


You're Mine

by TTMIYH



Series: You're Mine/I'm Yours [1]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - No Sburb/Sgrub Sessions, Bulges and Nooks, Dom/sub, Dubious Consent, F/F, Femdom, Femsub, Happiness in Slavery, Heaps and heaps and heaps of dramatic irony because I'm cruel like that, Hermaphroditic Trolls (Homestuck), Humiliation, Implied/Referenced Mind Control, Impregnation, Large Dom/Small Sub, Mind Control, Mind Games, Minor Rose Lalonde/Kanaya Maryam, My goal in life is to make you cry and then also make you horny, Oviposition, Partial Mind Control, Sex Toys, Sexual Slavery, Size Difference, Stockholm Syndrome, Tentabulges, Unreliable Narrator, Xenophilia
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-02-20
Updated: 2019-08-29
Packaged: 2019-11-01 04:11:08
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 18
Words: 31,437
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17860040
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TTMIYH/pseuds/TTMIYH
Summary: She wasn't going to break this easily. She was a human. She was stronger than that."I'm not scared." She said, after a quick nudge from the Empress's foot. It was less of a say and more of a cough, or maybe even a groan, but definitely not a full-hearted either of those two things. "I don't think I have any scare left in me, fish-face." She said, expecting a retaliatory kick to the spine like her insults had gotten her from the rest of the Empress's guard. But instead, she just heard a curious humming from behind her. "I don't think I have anything left in me, really." She spoke, simply and truthfully. Meenah's grin was razor sharp and wide enough to bite heads."I'd be inclined ta disagree."





	1. Initialization

**Author's Note:**

  * For [RoxyPop](https://archiveofourown.org/users/RoxyPop/gifts).



> I hope you all enjoy Roxy's slow breakdown, because I sure as hell enjoyed writing it. 
> 
> Trigger Warning for painfully realistic freaking out in Chapter 7.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> in·i·tial·ize  
> /iˈniSHəˌlīz/
> 
> set to the value or put in the condition appropriate to the **start** of an operation.

Well, that was that.

The invasion was swift, brutal, and efficient. By the time humanity, in all of her 2011 glory, had realized what exactly had just come knocking on her intergalactic doorstep, it was too late to muster an effective response. Betty Crocker, of all people, led the revolution - humans brainwashed by years of subliminal messaging crippled their own infrastructure, and then willfully surrendered. Things were grim, but the shining beacon of true resistance was always bright, like the spark of the human spirit, an anime-like contraption nestled deep within the flame of one's soul!

The rebellion lasted 6 hours. Now, Earth was a backwater.

The scraping of her natural resources was about as quick as the war. Biological curiosities had their genomes cataloged and then their carcasses thrown in the acid wash, ready to have their most advantageous traits spliced into the Alternian war-machine. In particular, they found the many canine subspecies both amusing and useful. More teeth were never a bad thing. As for the sentient, civilization-having species that resided the Earth, previously prepared for their interstellar aspirations, solemnly stricken swiftly, with scintillating semi-steel serpents slicing skulls, splitting streets, spawning servitors, well... They had their uses. A fine pelt, but not enough for coats or ornamentation, although that didn't stop several of the Empress's top threshecutioners from trying their hardest. And as lower-order mammalians, their sexual dimorphism was both noticeable, and, to some, reprehensible. However, Humans did have a luxuriously soft epidermis and a body temperature that, for the highbloods, was generally considered to be decently warm. All of the positive traits of a lowblooded slave with none of the social status loss. The varied skin colors, hair colors, presenting such a visual flair, and yet they all bled red and came white and pissed yellow - how curious. Curiosity is where they began, and curiosity is where they would stay.

Roxy Lalonde was one of those curiosities. Pale skin bordering on the unhealthy, which she believed, truly, in her heart, would get only unhealthier as time went on. What was normally an elegantly styled curl of bleached, platinum-blonde-white hair around her face had turned into a damp, shaggy mop hanging over her visage, framing it like a shredded painting, her bright pink irises visible. She was slender, and probably would've been considered cute on her homeworld, but at this point, the Battleship Condescension had long since left the Sol system behind, despite it being a mere two days since the first and only invasion. Little more than an afterthought. Two chains, curved to each other like the human "6", or possibly the human "9", made out of gaudy and somewhat easily bendable gold kept her pinned to the floor by her wrists, although she had several yards of latitude. The rest of her clothes had been removed a while ago, and her body was unblemished for the time being unless you counted gentle smatterings of freckles to be blemishes. The most desirable feature in her own eyes were her hips and legs, as everything else seemed wanting to her when she looked in a mirror. Trolls would find her anatomy strange, particularly the lack of tentacular genitalia blessing the area between her legs, but the Empress found her pink eyes intriguing. So close to her own, yet with that hint of saccharine brightness that all human pigmentation seemed to possess.

Nothing like the Empress, no, no. Unlike human ship construction, the front of the Battleship Condescension contained a pointed throne room, with an array of windows when the Empress felt like gazing outwards at the hyperspace lanes, stars turning into white and blue and red lines across her vision. Imperial tactics were simple: arrive out of hyperspace shortly after the rest of your forward fleet and blitz the planet as hard as possible, then depart swiftly. If they survived, you returned later, and if the opponent was another interstellar race like hers, you went for their homeworld, and then cut their supply lines. Alternians had something more in common with humans than vague skeletal convergences, namely, a kind of hellish ferocity when stoked, a cunning, trapper's mind when on the hunt, and the ability to accurately throw objects at a distance. If a human had suggested to her that maybe she would be safer in the depths of the ship, guarded by layers and layers of red metal, then she would skewer them against the wall and then politely inform her that the center of the ship was where her respiteblock was, and that she didn't ask for the human's opinion on imperial fleet construction. To be fair to the human, if a troll suggested that she would've done the same, but the trolls knew better, and were thoroughly schoolfed on imperial fleet construction.

The throne room was bare but effective, with a throne large enough for the Empress with room to spare, in case she was in a dozing mood, and little else except what she needed with her, which changed by the day. It came to a tapered point at the tip, ready to ram something out of the deep black of space. The Empress herself was as imposingly stark as the rest of the room, about three meters tall without the horns getting involved, and a physique that would've looked imposing on anyone of normal human height. She had muscles, of course, considering she hefted around a gold bi-trident all day, and the muscles were coated in a thin layer of fat, all underneath her grey, smooth-yet-leathery skin. Her wetsuit had been recently re-fitted on her, so that the H-shaped symbol that marked her reign was not distorted too heavily by her figure, which, to use sparse cliche, could be charitably considered "voluptuous". An array of jewelry decorated her limbs from top to bottom, a series of piercings in her fins. Remnants of her more childish days as an heiress that she kept with her as a personal symbol.

Their staredown, for Roxy, was filled with the immensity of the human spirit. Blinking had been reserved for special occasions, like the extra helping of stuffing at Thanksgiving, the post-dessert one where you're already full but still want a little more. Troll eyes didn't need that kind of lubrication, so Roxy couldn't tell that the Empress felt her unease coming off of her in radiating waves like an aurora surrounding a planetoid. When Roxy's chains rattled, the Empress smiled. "Is it fin-ally time ta talk?" She drawled, words leaking out of her mouth like condensed milk, an Earth delicacy never again to be consumed by any species. "Here I was thinking you were gonna give me a cold shoulder the entire trip."

Roxy remained silent, furrowing her brow in an attempt to look defiant. Her arms came forward and she tugged at her chains more, a gesture she had given up on four hours ago. Perhaps the solitude had weakened the metal?

It had not. Roxy's anger grew.

"C'mon, gill, that's no way to treat an Empress. Much less me. Let's have a little talk about things, like the sentients we are." She responded, as Roxy's arms attempted to wrench themselves violently out of her sockets. Due to the connections her wrists had, however, her attempt failed. Pity. "Don't hurt yourself, now."

Roxy let out a noise that was somewhere between a grunt, a yell, and a harrumph. "I'm not moving my arms." She spat, with defiance distinctly unsuited for someone in her position.

"I'm not sure what you're talking about. You're very clearly moving your arms. See?" The Empress said, chuckling under her breath, revealing between her fuchsia-painted lips what appeared to be rows of razor-sharp teeth. Roxy's arms continued to jerk, each one trying to pull in the other direction. Finally, the human girl in front of her lost her composure and let out a yell of pain, tears welling up in her eyes. She blinked them away, bravely as she could. "Can ya tell that the wrists are locked together? You'll jus' break your fragile human shoulders doing that. You should just relax."

At that, Roxy's eyes immediately drooped and her arms fell limply onto her body while she collapsed. Her eyes glazed over, and then screwed up as she shook her head back into wakefulness. "Stop that." She hush-grunted, ignominiously using her face to push herself back up onto her knees. She fell asleep again, although this time her head held itself up on a cushion of air before she could crack it open on the cool, metal floor. When her eyes fluttered open, they immediately shut again, and this process repeated for about a minute until Roxy yelled "Enough! Please!" between KOs.

"Can we talk like sentient adults of breedin' age, then?" The Empress said, smugly smiling.

"Fine. What do you want to talk about?" Roxy hissed. She collapsed onto her knees, and then down flat on the ground, pressed down by an invisible weight before being lifted back up into a kneeling position.

"I'd like to discuss the confishons of your stay here." The Empress began, tenting her fingers together while holding her bitrident in the crook of her elbow. "I don't know what sort of stuff you humans like. Your planet didn't mean much ta us in the grand schema things. Unlike your fellas, I'm willing to treat you with a lil' more dignity than as a bulgeslave."

"You're asking me what I _want_? I..." Roxy was put even more ill at ease. This had to be a trick of some sort, a little voice in her head said, before she overwhelmed it with a "Stop conspiring with the enemy!" kind of thought. "I want my planet back. And, and... I want my sister back. And my brothers. And my friends." She hurtled, beginning to cry as freely as the Empress allowed. "I want to go back. Please. I don't want to be here anymore." She said, sitting on the floor, looking out the window as the situation struck her. A gentle aching in her wrists and shoulders begged to be rubbed at, and a glow in the corner of her eye was asking for attention, but all she could see was that she didn't recognize any of the constellations. Her sobs had left her, now the tears simply bled out of her eyes like water between rocks.

The Empress was almost touched. "Ya know I can't do that. But if they haven't been culled, I can keep ya updated. Would you like to know?" The Empress responded, unsure if her own personal emotion for the moment was malice, glee, or understanding. It was likely a mixture of all three, predominated by the first.

"I'll think about it." Roxy said as calmly as could be mustered, looking back towards the object of her ire, eyes a bit red and puffy while she wiped them clean with her wrist. "An-and don't think I'm going to sell anyone out! I'm not giving you a thing for this. I won't."

"Haaaaa ha ha ha haaaaaaa!" A laugh abounded the room, bouncing off the walls, ricocheting like a bullet. "I'm sorry, guppy, but there's nobody left to sell out. Come here." Roxy's mouth said no at the exact same time that her feet said yes, while she stiffly rose to their soles and began ambling forward, eyes widening, pupils shrinking. By the time her chin had made contact with the Empress's hand, she had her senses back: far too late. She struggled, but with a thumb over her mouth like she was carrying a chalice, Roxy was silenced, her thin mouth pressed shut. Nails, bright orange and long, dug into her skin. "I'm not gonna hurt ya, because I like your eyes, gill. They're the closest to mine I've seen in a human, and I'm sure that's worth something, although maybe not in your pre-industrial civilization. You're gonna keep my bath occupied, and my pailing cushions." She declared, with finality and grace. "I'm going to treat you like reclaimed sunken treasure, because that's what ya are ta me. You're going to be a decoration. Maybe even a decoration with some decorations of ya own. Does the thought scare ya?"

Roxy's eyes and browline said no while her head twitched up and down jerkily, like she was having some kind of seizure. Her muffled mouth said no but when her mouth was allowed open the long o began to slither into a "'kay.", like a serpent receding. The Empress's eyes narrowed.

"I was askin' a "yes" or "no" question, not an "okay" or "not okay" question, but I appreciate ya eagerness." She snarkily replied, letting go of Roxy's head and watching her flop onto the ground like a ragdoll, something cracking in her ankles as she rolled along the cold metal, shivering into it for warmth. The thought did scare her. It was all hitting her now, even though it seemed like a bad dream. It had been a day on this wretched battleship and already she was beginning to lose it - she knew that Trolls could mind control each other, it was a power she had used against them during her short career as a guerilla. But none of them could do the same to any of the humans, outside of the initial wave of Betty Crocker worshippers. The most they could do was make her fall asleep. Now that she was thinking about sleep, tiredness licked at her eyes, but she forced herself awake, staring out the window blankly from the ground. She wasn't going to break this easily. She was a human. She was stronger than that.

"I'm not scared." She said, after a quick nudge from the Empress's foot. It was less of a say and more of a cough, or maybe even a groan, but definitely not a full-hearted either of those two things. "I don't think I have any scare left in me, fish-face." She said, expecting a retaliatory kick to the spine like her insults had gotten her from the rest of the Empress's guard. But instead, she just heard a curious humming from behind her. "I don't think I have anything left in me, really." She spoke, simply and truthfully. Meenah's grin was razor sharp and wide enough to bite heads.

"I'd be inclined ta disagree."


	2. Infiltration

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> in·fil·tra·tion  
> /ˌinfilˈtrāSHən/
> 
> the action of entering or gaining access to an organization or place **surreptitiously** , especially in order to acquire secret information or **cause damage**.

Roxy walked. It was the most she could do at this point, and evidently, her body wanted her to walk more than her mind did, because if she had her way she'd still be cowering against the cold metal of the Battleship Condescension's throne room. Her shoulders weren't as sore, but raw pink marks were scattered across her wrists while the Empress led her forward by a leash. "I didn't want ta have ta take the leash out on ya. I figured you'd be a little more compliant than that." She said.

"A day ago, I wanted nothing more than to kill you," Roxy replied, her voice heavier than lead. The collar around her neck was built for restraint, not function - it was heavy, thick layers of gold, keeping her head bent up and her posture straight while the chain attached to the Empress's hand rattled. Normally, she might be slurring a little, but all the alcohol had long since drained out of her system. "Correction, actually, I still want to kill you."

"But you know that you can't, yeah?" The Empress responded, tugging Roxy's collar forward. Stubbornly, the human pulled back with her neck and was quickly tossed to the ground, about a foot in front of the Empress. The pain in her ankle flared back up as she got back to her feet. Roxy knew it was better to keep walking than to let the Empress drag her along the cool floor. This vile alien would definitely do so if necessary.

"I don't." Roxy responded dryly, getting back and walking, ignoring the pain in her ankle. "And I'm going to try every opportunity I get."

"Good, I'm gonna need a pet that can keep me on my toes. Your "sister" is alive, by the way." The Empress dropped so nonchalantly like a knife down into a soft bed. You could barely hear the penetration into the surface of the mattress, as Roxy stopped in her tracks and was immediately tossed forward again like a football. She laid there, dragged along.

"I don't see what you get out of the whole 'lying to me' arrangement. And I told you I haven't decided on whether I wanted to know." Roxy said, slowly pulling herself back up on her feet. She tripped and stumbled a couple of times, mostly on her ankle. The hallways seemed to go on forever, even as they twisted and turned.

"You were taking too long, so I made the decision. She's been taken in by some Jade of the caste name Maryam, sez the crew manifest." The Empress retorts as she walks Roxy to a cylindrical door, that opens up to meet them as a gaping maw turned sideways. She tilts her head a little bit at her own holographic, pink-and-gold PDA. Or, at the very least, some kind of tablet-like device. "A couple of backtalk incidents, but nothing the boys can't handle."

That brought a smile to Roxy's face for the first time in a while. It was a defiant, petulant smile - the kind a rebellious human still possessing a spark would throw to her monstrous, tyrannical sea Hitler captor. "I don't think Rose will be really interested in what the boys can handle." She threw. Backtalk incidents, that sounded like Rose. Each one was recorded in an unfamiliar script, as Roxy scrolled through the PDA's menu with practiced ease, admiring the unflattering picture of her sister, and then the Empress snatched it back out of her hand.

"You'll have more time ta read it later. Not ta say I'm holding her hostage, but I am going to say that her continued survival is contingent on your cooperafin." The Empress said, smirking confidently towards her reflection on the other side of the elevator doors. Roxy looked down at her knees, weary of the kneeling position she had put herself in, and tried to stand up. It hurt her ankle too much, so she didn't continue. She didn't say anything. She had nothing else to say. "But I like the ones that talk back. I know that the guards don't, but that's cuz they all have sticks up their waste chutes."

Roxy had decided she no longer wanted to give her the satisfaction. The interior of the elevator was a cool red, smelling the faint kind of salty that hung in the air at a shorehouse, like the kind her family owned in Rhode Island, back when that was a place with people alive in it. Anything not red was trimmed with fuchsia or a dark, lustrous purple, and the noises besides the soft humming of some air filtration were the gentle squishes of the Alternian biotech at work. She saw it firsthand during her rebellion and had gotten used to the noises distressingly quickly. She didn't want to get used to this. One day she'd wake up back home and this would all be a bad dream. And she'd go say hi to John over Skype and go to a café with Callie while Dave worked on his shitty comics and Dirk was off rapping somewhere. And on the other side of the country, Jane would be working at her little bakery startup, her entrepreneurial BFF, and Jake and Jade would be wherever they were at any given moment. She'd wake up and brush her hair in front of the mirror, the ratty tangles of wiry blondish left over her face while she stared at herself, dirt free from last night's shower with the cleaning hose. Wiping her eyes from last night's good cry with her friends, and they were still red and puffy and a little bruised from the intensity of it all. Her mirror splitting in half and opening up to reveal another hallway only barely struck her from her stupor. She ambled along, step by step. Getting used to this was the worst thing she could think of, even besides never getting to see anyone she knew again. "Can I see her again?"

"What, your hatchmate?" The Empress asked, casually tossing her PDF to the floor with her free hand like a frisbee. Roxy bounded after it, her ankle creaking and sending her to the ground as she grabbed at it, staring at the pink-tinted photo. Even in the monochrome the deep, rich color of Rose's eyes stood out. The fury, the fire, the wit. She stared at Rose's photo until it became blurry, clutching the display to her chest, looking down like grabbing her favorite teddy bear who was really a teddy cat because she liked cats more than bears. When she was a girl she loved the shit out of that teddy cat, her favorite sleeping object. Keeping an extra blanket over her shoulders as a shield so the horrorterrors couldn't grab her. Rose. Rose. Rose. She stared at the poster-sized display, each hand grabbing at one corner, her back dragging against the ground as she smiled and laughed giddily. Rosie was okay! She was alive, and that was what mattered. She had to focus on the little things, like Rose, and how sometimes Rose took her teddy cat because they both loved cats so much but she only slept with one blanket because she was never afraid of the dark, even as a baby. She looked at Rose's disheveled bob-cut, and then at the thin air where the PDA was a couple of minutes ago, her eyes focusing onto an unfamiliar ceiling. Her back ached a little. "Up and at 'em." She was told, and she began standing up before her collar was pulled up with a yank, almost dangling her into the air.

The room looked sort of like a bathroom and a bedroom at the same time. The tiling alternated between black and fuchsia in large, semi-regular slates, not squares like she was used to, with gleaming, glimmering trim. She was scooped up by bone-pulverizing troll arms, and didn't try to wriggle out when her ankle was put into some kind of contraption, the likes of which she couldn't reasonably describe in words that existed for her. But a searing warmth filled her ankle, and when she was pulled out and dropped on a cushion, she let out a sigh of relief she didn't realize she had in her. The doors hissed shut and the collar snapped itself off, falling apart like a complex puzzle into several dozen intricately linked rings that were hoisted over her head and away. The cushion was, unlike most other things in this room, a stark white, about the size of her Mom's bed in her master bedroom, never occupied enough to fill up that particular space. It seemed almost quaint, compared to the behemoth of a woman who sat herself down next to it, arranging several pillows against the wall, some of them pitch black, some pink, some glittering, sequin gold, and the others various mixtures and ratios of those three primary colors. "Pillows? I thought y'all slept in slime, right?" Roxy said, almost scoffing until she realized how tired she was and collapsed into them, exhaustion and pain hitting her body all at once. Trapped there inside her skin, all she could do was look around and take in sensory information, such as the bed uncrunching underneath her, creaking away as the Empress stood up in a room made for people as tall as her.

"My respiteblock's a guppy'la rooms away." The Empress replied, smiling narrowly with a strained fish pun. The room was angled slightly downward towards a center, albeit barely, and what little knowledge she had of materials told her that the topmost sheet of this bed, let's call a spade a spade here, was probably waterproofed. That's what it felt like, at least. Across the way from her was a large, mostly rectangular, slightly triangular bath dug into a corner and stretched out to occupy as much of it as possible. It looked a little alien and goopy but a bath was a bath, and the low-lying shelves lined with various products were definitely bath things. The chef knife's sized comb, so intricately carved, definitely belonged to the Empress, too. Several other alcoves in the walls contained other things, opening up into more mechanical orifices like the one the Empress was reaching into right now, retracting what looked to be a robotic grub, gently writhing in her hands.

"Oh my god," Roxy said out loud, unable to contain her inner thoughts for much longer. It began to dawn on her that this was not a bathroom, or a bedroom. She rolled onto her back, covering her chest, while her legs opened up against her best judgment. No, damn you, close! No no no no, no, no no no. A thousand times no.

"Man, what sort of boring pailing aids did  _you_ freaks have?" The Empress chuckled, darkly and thickly, as she climbed back onto the spacious bed. "Relax. It's not a live one. We're still not sure if they could mess up your human nook somehow so I'm waiting until the tests can get back to me."

"So it's _dead_?" Roxy ask-squealed, her shame getting the best of her for a moment, leaving her body in one solemn burst, from a popping and deflating balloon.

"No, it's an imitation, dummy." The Empress answered, and Roxy felt her shame both diminish and increase a thousandfold. So, she wasn't going to have a giant worm inside of her, but she was going to have a mechanical imitation of a gigantic worm inside of her, unless she closed her legs, which she couldn't.

"Have you been mind-controlling me this entire time?" Roxy finally asked, the burning thought that's been on her mind but disallowed from speech until the Empress deemed it appropriate. 

"Of course not. Only searuleanbloods can do that, and it don't work on ya humans. Remember?" The Empress responded, tapping her head twice with two fingers before getting up to Roxy's side, placing something cold and metal and plastic against her crotch, making the little human decoration shiver. Roxy didn't believe her, but the thought wouldn't come out anymore. She hitched her breath and it came out like a hissing, squealing sigh as little gripping arms grabbed a hold of her and dragged themselves inward like a perverse inchworm. "If you lacked this much intel, no wonder y'all lost so fast." The Empress replied. It sounded like she was teasing, but it also sounded like someone just making a statement of fact. Of course she knew that. Only the sea... The ceruleanbloods could do the mind control thing. And on humans, it puts them to sleep. Now, Roxy's embarrassment was growing roughly in proportion with her level of penetration, and she dug her head back into the pillow pile, letting out a loud, cathartic wail. She hated it. She hated it. It felt bad and wrong. It wasn't supposed to be like this.

Rose. A helpful black arm held the screen in front of her and Roxy bit her lip. Rose was here. Roxy stared at Rose as she started to cry, each wriggle of the synthetic nookworm forcing a breath up from her pelvis, into her diaphragm, and then out of her mouth. Every couple of seconds, the sinuous, winding motion pushed it further, and Roxy's increasing wetness gave those pushes a little more leverage to work with. Rose would want her to be strong. Rose was probably hating this just as much as Roxy was. Rose's legs weren't splayed out like Roxy's was, she was always the stronger sister. Rose was fine, so Roxy was going to be strong and fine for her. Her heavy, heaving, almost hiccuping breaths turned into laughter as everything began to tickle, and then into sobs as everything turned to dust. Earth was gone. And she was having a giant robot inchworm put in her pussy. She started laughing again when the arm pushed Rose to her face. Rose would've been fine with this degrading treatment. Just stay strong like Rose is, with that Maryam dude (or girl - she hoped for Rose's sake it was a girl).

When she stopped laughing, her legs finally shut, pelvis sore, two orgasms worth of wetness wrenched out of her that she didn't recall making. She turned her head to look for the Empress, seeing nothing, and decided that she should nap when she could.

Keep her energy up, and all that.


	3. Appreciation

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ap·pre·ci·a·tion  
> /əˌprēSHēˈāSH(ə)n/
> 
> recognition and enjoyment of the **good qualities** of someone or **something**.

"Clam down. I'm not gonna go at'cha yet." The Empress said, laughing under her breath at the writhing girl to her side. Evidently, the human release of fluids post-coitus was in much smaller amounts than her own, because it seemed like her coital cushion was barely needed. Roxy turned away from her, face screwed up, not wanting to show her any of the twenty-five or so different emotions on display at the same time, each one fighting for dominance. She was awoken an hour ago by the grinding, wriggling feeling of the metallo-plastic 'creature' inside of her beginning to twist and twirl itself like a ballerina on a slow-moving drill bit, its little grabby feeler arms having hardened into tiny little nubs, each one pressing into its own little ring of flesh inside of her. Occasionally and rhythmically, one of them would press up against somewhere good, and Roxy had to fight all of her basest, lizard-brain instincts to squeal. She hated it.

The Empress had only returned to the room a couple of minutes ago, and Roxy didn't even realize that she hadn't considered the possibility of escape.

Roxy was without words. She wasn't sure what they were right now. Every time she tried to speak, her breath caught in her throat and it came out as individual syllables or shuddering, roaring breaths, the voice of someone having far more fun than she was. She hated how good this fucking metal caterpillar felt inside of her, and how her only thoughts for the past hour had been "Even if they're alien conquerors, they make a damn good sex toy", she hated that part especially. It felt like a betrayal that her body was clenching up with soreness, legs twitching and spasming with the twelfth orgasm unnaturally wrenched from her petite frame. Her pelvis was sore but her outsides weren't rubbed raw like a vibrator might do, which probably had to do with the fact that the entirety of the "synthetic nookworm" was inside of her, only what looked to be a glimmering fuchsia pearl at the end of it, just so slightly peeking out. She thinks that, at some point, she had squirted, but it was hard to tell between the measures of indistinct warmth between her legs. Her body's reactions were all hazing and blurring together at the edges like a shitty watercolor in the process of drying. Everything was leaking out into everything else.

The Empress didn't realize that Roxy wasn't shrinking away from her, she was just overstimulated. Dumb troll Empress. She doesn't know a damn thing.

"I was getting things set up for ya. No sense in breaking my art before I can frame it." The Empress responded, putting a hand on Roxy's shoulder. The human girl immediately relaxed into it, a sense of calm filling her stomach and spreading out like the cold chill of water on a parched day. A soft glow came off of the Empress's eyes, and her soft smile, baring all her fangs, seemed genuine to Roxy. Her legs untensed before wildly kicking up in a muscle spasm, as the Empress held her hand out and the wriggling, spinning thing inside of Roxy began wrenching itself outwards. Roxy came another time from the motion and feeling, but not as violently. Her head thrust itself into the coital cushion, her chest arching up into the air about an inch before the rest of her body started clamping down. The Empress gave the synthetic nookworm an impermeable expression before depositing it in one of the alcoves of the wall, one which shunted itself away, replaced with a smooth, flush section.

"Frame it? Are you gonna fatten me on a canvas and hang me on a wall?" She said as the Empress stared at her. "Uh, flatten." She corrected, cursing her slip of the tongue. Why did she feel sheepish in front of her sworn enemy, the destroyer of the human race? Why was she rubbing the back of her head nervously? The pause in the room was pregnant, the air still, before the Empress burst out laughing.

"Baaaahahahahaha! While I'm shore that's  _someone's_ pailrequisite, it ain't mine." She responded, dropping several dozen rings over Roxy's head before she could react, ones that quickly tightened back into a heavy golden collar, and just as swiftly, she affixed the leash. A kind of thick, woven rope, probably made out of gold strands, since out of all the fetishes, Roxy guessed that "shiny things" was the Empress's. She saved herself the trouble, getting up from the bed once the Empress did, not acknowledging her victorious-seeming smirk. She wasn't going to give her the satisfaction. She'd kick and yell. Nobody was making a decoration out of her, not on her watch. Roxy was sullen and silent, shaky, sumptuous legs scarcely supporting her slender figure. Silly girl, so spellbound, she saw such scant signs of her substantial fascination, soon to gestate and blossom.

When she saw the wall open up to meet them, she understood now why she never thought about running away. Memories returning to her after the post-orgasmic haze (calling it an "afterglow" would be generous, said her sore bits), of looking around to find no doors, only walls. She wasn't even sure which direction they entered the room from, but they meandered through a hallway again. Hallways upon hallways, she took her time trying to analyze the directions and turns. The floor wasn't exactly carpeted down here, but it was made out of some soft, squishy material in the center, bright black and littered with amelodic, fuchsia-glowing lines, scattered here and there but always connected despite their branching paths. When they branched especially hard, it was towards a door, stopping at the edge of the black material but pointing towards the doors nonetheless, which shared the candy-red-and-pink coloration of the rest of the Battleship Condescension. The doors were, for the most part, cylindrical, or at least had the appearance of a cylinder embedded in the wall that she could only see the front 1/5 of, and the way some of them opened up when she got too close, sliding inwards, seemed to support that interpretation. The rows of lights dotting the ceiling were low and dim, but white, not unlike the expensive bulbs you got for your home office or your chandelier. Not the sick, zombie-yellow light that streetlights cast on you.

Roxy's many shadows were sharp and clear, her short walk soon ending. She didn't remember the way from the chamber she was in to the new one, but she expected she'd be here for a while. She could memorize it later.

Troll architectural standards bothered her. Human rooms were almost always flush squares, flush rectangles, with more squares or rectangles cut out of them, but Troll rectangles were pressed up against each other at odd angles, and Troll squares were sized as cubes for people much taller than her, making her feel like a mouse traipsing along a cupboard. She couldn't have touched the tops of any of the doorframes she stared idly at, standing there at attention outside of the most formal, hallway-ending door. It took a sharp tug on her leash, but this time, her body was prepared, and she stumbled onto her feet, not falling onto her face again. Fish bitch wasn't gonna catch her unaware, no she wasn't.

The Empress's room looked freshly cleaned and recently re-arranged. One corner had swelled outwards into a small, private little square, complete with a shorter ceiling that Roxy felt, instinctively, was for her. A small, bright pink hatch slid shut onto it the second she walked into the room, causing her to raise a tired eyebrow. What time was it? Roxy didn't know how many hours had passed since her capture. The math in her head said that it was probably about twenty-eight hours, but the lack of external reference made her unsure. The Empress's respiteblock was almost like an art museum, almost childish, in a way, with chains and beads of gold, silver, and other shiny metals draped across the ceiling, drooping down. Banners and cloth and ribbon all streamed down, and the spaces in between them showed off pinpricks of light reminiscent of the streaming-past stars, although Roxy strongly doubted it was a window. From this spot on the ground, it was hard to tell, but logic dictated that it was some kind of screen or television.

She stopped staring upwards at the ceiling and instead looked around the rest of the room once she realized that there was no door behind her anymore and that the Empress had left ten minutes ago, leaving her leash attached to an anchor point on the wall. To her left stood a massive dresser that could undoubtedly kill her if it fell on her. To her right, oh, the corner with the sealed pink hatch. There was no handle on it that she could see from the outside. She noticed, following the chains and drapes with her eyes, a large, cocoon-like structure dangling from the roof of the room, pinned into the walls, although the anchor points were beyond her vision, covered up in the mass of draping objects. The bottom tapered out, digging into the ground like roots. Either way, it was far too high up for her to be able to climb into it, and she didn't know why she thought to do so.

By the time the Empress returned, Roxy had gotten bored enough to try sitting, but then realized that her leash was too short to do so. To sit was to invite self-strangulation, and so she knelt. She felt disgust well up in her like bile when the towering Troll woman tousled her hair with one hand, wrenching herself away hard enough to accidentally choke herself for a moment on her collar. The Empress snapped her finger, and the collar fell apart on Roxy's neck, a rush of air filling up her lungs. She didn't know it was restricting her breathing until it wasn't, and she felt almost thankful to breathe by the time she extricated herself from the collar's components, the leash retracting into the wall, leaving only a splay of golden rings like some kind of modern art. The rest of the room looked similar, and she couldn't tell what was art and what had some kind of crueler purpose, but they were all attached to the wall, along with one giant portrait of the Empress that she couldn't see hidden behind the large cocoon. She paid attention to the floor for the first time, not smooth, but not rough, a kind of firm in between like thick foam padding. Getting to her feet was easy here, and the floor rose up to meet the Empress's rear as it sat down, hexagonal chunks of it forming an ersatz, miniature throne for her, two of them propping each foot up. There was a gentle hissing sound behind her as Roxy turned to face the Empress, but she paid it no mind.

"So, because I am nofin if not kind as fuck, I've been spending most of the day settin' up this little corner for ya." The Empress said, twirling her finger as Roxy turned around to face the little human-sized room. A light flicked on, bathing it in that pure, stark, white glow. It wasn't a bedroom, and, to be honest, it was barely a room, with her tangled hair dragging against the ceiling before she knelt down into it. But there was a bed, heavens, a bed, and a small basin with running water controlled by a dial. Not enough to submerge herself, or drown herself should it come to that, but it was warm and it soothed her legs as she sat down in front of the small protrusion in the wall that made do for a faucet.

For about a minute, she forgot where she was, relaxing her head onto a small pile of pillows prepared for her. She rolled onto her front, gasping and sighing as the water ran over her rear, curling around her sore pelvis. She took inventory the best she could with the sleepiness plaguing her mind, trying to see if she was allowed anything that could cut a vein, like a toothbrush, or a razor, but the small alcoves for personal belongings didn't have anything in them, to begin with. The only other "things" in the room were a set of towels put between the washbasin and the floor-set load gaper.

Maybe she could gag the Empress to death, stuff some towels down her throat. Or choke her out. She'd... Think about the plan. There had to be something she could use. It wasn't like she was some kind of rebel leader, after all. She was just a human girl. Twenty  two. Before the Six Hour Rebellion (that's what she named it - if you named it, it became official, and right now she was the arbiter of human history), she had never seen a gun, much less held or fired one. But she'd do something. She'd seen John's movies. Nic Cage could get out of a tighter bind. John McClane wouldn't have given up at this point. She wasn't even startled when the Empress poked her head into the small room. "Ya welcome."

"F-fuck you," Roxy growled, and the hatch clicked shut, light dimming to a less distressingly bright level. 


	4. Relaxation

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> re·lax·a·tion  
> /rēˌlakˈseiSH(ə)n/
> 
> the state of being **free from tension** and anxiety.

When Roxy woke up, she had given up on keeping track of time. Her little corner-room made time impossible, after all, although there were some things different in her little cubby. She tried to stretch out - no dice. The room was just barely too small for her to fit in any straight lines while lying down, unless she lay diagonally, corner to corner, and the height didn't really help for sleeping unless she felt like sleeping sitting up, or with her legs in the water. The dial controlled the temperature, but not the flow: it was a constant, steady dribble, a trickle, enough to use but not enough to really enjoy. She stretched her sore limbs the best they could, mostly vertically, and stood up. No dice on that way either, as the ceiling was literally just an inch too short for her to stand up completely. She cursed the Empress, sarcastically snipping at her in her brain, how if she really wanted to make her decoration happy she'd give her a room that fit. There was enough room, thankfully, that with the aid of a towel to lean on she was able to comfortably use the load gaper embedded in the ground, letting out a little noise as it sprayed her rear with water. Space bidets? Is that what they've stooped to, now?

And then... She was alone. She didn't hear any noises outside that indicated that the Empress was around, but there was no handle on her side of the hatch and it was flush with the wall. Could she, theoretically, pry it loose with her short-trimmed nails? Maybe, but it was only a maybe and it would probably require some gruesome creativity that, honestly, Roxy didn't have in her. No way of knowing if the Empress was outside, outside of footsteps, and while she was a very large troll the padding was, apparently her footfalls were soft enough on the padding that Roxy had blanked on her return several times. So, she might as well enjoy the solitude.

Day 1, she counted it. She didn't have anything that could carve something into the wall, and carving it into her arm was beyond wild, so she just tried to mentally keep track. Day 1. It was Day 1. She would've said it out loud, but then she'd feel silly.

She took the time to examine the objects in the little cubby holes in the wall. When she pressed on the insides of the cubbies, upwards or downwards, they seemed to jiggle a bit. But then, she moved her hand out of the way and they quickly jumped upwards, loading a new cubby with a different object. Whenever her hand, or any of her, got even remotely close to the soft, white walls, they stopped shifting around. She guessed she wasn't going to be able to give herself an impromptu medical emergency, should the need arise. Feeling around the walls revealed a button, one slightly above, one slightly below, the cubbies, that did the same function as poking their interiors. She was taking stock of her situation. She could MacGyver this. She was smart. She had to, for Rose.

There were five cubbies total, two on each side of the rectangular room, parallel to one another, and then one in the direct middle of the back wall, where the load gaper was. That fifth cubby in the back was completely empty, so she used it as her starting point, naming them A, B, C, D, and E, clockwise. When she tried to empty one of them out and retrieve a new item from containment, it angrily buzzed for a hot second and then refused to move. So she couldn't take items out of the cubbies on a permanent basis, that was good information to have, we're getting somewhere. The room could be separated out into rough quadrants, removing the load gaper from the equation, since it had Cubby A assigned to it. That meant that two of them were for the bed (D and E), one of them was for the water basin (B), and then the other one could've been for the water basin or the pillow pile, right on the edge (C). If the Empress was trying to ensure some level of comfort, probably to get Roxy to like her more, that meant that the items in question were roughly comparable to necessary things to use the objects where they were set at.

Now that she had a hypothesis, it was time to test it. Her first object from B was a small, kind of firm container, with several unfamiliar letters etched into it. She couldn't tell if Alternian was just written like that, or if this was supposed to be rough-hewn, but she did turn it upside down, watching as a slow dollop of something deep blue and sticky leaked out from the tip and dropped into the basin, quickly washed away. So, that meant it was probably some kind of bath good, like soap or shampoo. She didn't remember what the stuff in the pailing room looked like because she wasn't staring at it as hard as she could, but she figured that if hair worked roughly the same across species, then the Empress would probably understand the importance of a good cleaning solution. Running off that logical-but-untested hypothesis, she hoped to god that their hair was keratin-based, upturning the container to her head and letting two droplets splatter out. There was no cap on it that she could tell, so she returned it to the cubby. If it cleaned her hair, it was shampoo, and if it ate her hair, it was probably acid, and if it dried her hair out it might've been body wash or something of the sort.

The anticipation made her chest hurt as she began to slowly massage it into her scalp, and then ran her head under the water, rewarded with a cascade of light blue, fizzy foam that dripped down her face.

Oh yeah. That was the stuff. Her hands stopped working cautiously and began to lather her hair for the first proper shower she had since all the time pre-Day 1. This was her first post-Day 1 shower. She slicked her hair back, trying not to fling water on her bed, and appreciated the feeling of her hair no longer being a dirty, wiry, tangled mess, and instead, being a clean, tangled mess. Her shoulders slumped a little, in a good way, as she pulled her hair out from under the "faucet", more like a crack in the wall, and grabbed one of her three available towels, the white and pink one pinned between two black and fuchsia ones. Drying off was quick and painless, and then it was back to testing. She slapped on B's buttons a little more, watching it shuffle up, and up, until she recognized the "shampoo bottle" from minutes ago. Then, she started to count. Four objects, plus an empty cubby. Logic had prevailed so far, so she guessed that the empty one was for returning dirty stuff, or possibly requesting a refill, or maybe both. She put the wet towel into it, slapped the "up" button, and then the "down" button. It accepted the towel, and then let out a soft, less-angry buzz before finally moving back down to the now-emptied cubby once more. Check two.

Time to test the rest of the objects in B. One of them was recognizably a comb, a mixture of various shades of pink, accented in gold. She used it for a minute to remove the most stubborn tangles and then put the now-hairy comb back into its hole. Then, something that looked like a rock at first glance, almost sharp, but when she gently touched it with her hand wrapped in one of the black towels, it came off in flakes that began dissolving into a fine powder. Dropping the powder into the water produced bubbles. She broke off a small chunk of it with the towel and pressed it into her palm as gently as possible, causing it to begin falling apart, and when she put a little more pressure on it, it shattered into increasingly small fragments quickly. Rubbing her hands together, she put them under the faucet and worked up a nice lather. Damn. That's number two on the three essential cleaning objects. She took another little break, using up half the black rock to get herself slippery and clean, and then drying herself off. If she had someone to beam with pride at, she would do so at having figured out this much. With nobody around though, she conjured up the image of Rose, still fierce and bitter with defiance, and prayed a little. The next hole down was a similar bottle to the first one she used, which meant that, assuming Trolls were similar enough to clean like humans, that was the shampoo, and what she had used earlier was the conditioner. Okay, that's fine, she can revise her theories. She didn't use any of it, but she revised her theories nonetheless. Then, the "conditioner". Then, the empty cubby. She put her second used towel into it.

Alright, next in line. Cubby C, between the basin and the pillows. There were only three "slots" in it. Two objects, and the empty slot for returning things. The first one looked to be a small little bug, almost like a horseshoe crab, and when she turned it over, she was not at all relieved to find what appeared to be several hundred small, grabby little legs slowly contained within the shell, moving around spasmodically. Still, this was what Alternian biotech was like, and she had a hunch to follow up on, the only issue was where to test...

Her arm would work. She put the little horseshoe crab on the back of her arm and prepared to have all the hairs on her arm plucked out because she was beginning to get the idea that the Empress was making it difficult for her to die for a reason. That was exactly what happened, but somehow it wasn't as painful as she thought it was going to be. Every little pair of arms, like a tiny set of tweezers, gently reached out, grabbed the base of each hair, and plucked it. There were a couple of strays, every here and there, but by passing the... "Razor" over her arm twice, she managed to get a pretty smooth shave. So another 30 minutes was thoroughly burnt through. Even though it wasn't like gender mattered anymore with most of the human race (not all! Most.) gone, she still appreciated being able to feel feminine, running her hands over now-smooth legs - or at least, self-enforcing the cultural touchstones that had been drilled into her head regarding femininity. Having smooth legs was nice! The second object in the cubby was another synthetic nookworm, so after she grabbed it, stared at it lazily, and then realized what it was, she almost threw it back into the cubby. No. Next.

Alright. Cubby D. This one was easy to recognize immediately, with thin, gossamer sheets that were stacked in neat squares. When she pulled one out of the cubby, it began to unfurl and then soften into a paper-thin blanket, which was better than the nothing she had before, and they were available in a rainbow of colors including black, white, pink, fuchsia, and gold. She grabbed a couple of the white and pink ones and wrapped them around her shoulders, luxuriating in their warmth, and when she went to tie them around her neck like a cape, she seemed to have difficulty keeping the knot held. Frustrated, she yanked them off and dropped them to the ground, grabbing two corners and winding them up like she was about to rat-tail someone with a towel. When she tied the simplest knot possible, it quickly began escaping itself, blanket unfurling back into its original shape in a matter of seconds before softening again.

Just great. Trolls had figured out programmable memory matter and their best use for it was anti-noose blankets. Real efficient, fuckers.

There were three slots in Cubby D, one stacked to the brim with these folded blanket squares, a completely folded one about the thickness of her pinky. She kept the handful she had chosen. The second slot contained pillows, of which she had plenty already moved into a decorative and useful little pile by the corner, since she figured she was going to have to sleep diagonally anyway. The third slot was the empty return slot. She wasn't sure why each one of them had a return slot. It didn't make a whole ton of sense to her, since presumably all the Cubbies could be used to return any object, but then again, maybe not? Perhaps she had to use the proper cubby per object or she would break something. She promised to herself to jam them all into the wrong cubbies whenever possible. In fact, she tried to do that just now. Setting B to its empty slot and taking out the synthetic nookworm from C, she put it into Cubby B, and then tried to return it.

It buzzed angrily at her, and she deflated. Okay. Time for E.

This one only had two slots - an empty one, and a small little piece of paper covered in Alternian writing and little boxes to the left of each group of text. There was a four-letter word at the top, or at least she assumed it was four letters, and the rest of the paper was split into two columns with four smaller-texted "phrases" each. When she pressed the checkbox next to one of the phrases, it lit up pink and remained lit. She tried patterns, she tried passwords, she tried various combinations, and came to two conclusions. One, this was both stupid and fun. Two, she could only select one object per column. When she pressed on a previously selected checkbox, the light died entirely. So, she pressed one, and tried to send it back up - what else was she going to do with it?

Angry buzz.

Alright, that didn't work. So she picked another one, both arbitrary, and sent it up. There was a small, pleasant chime, and Roxy felt pleased as punch with herself for figuring out this little puzzle. A soft tune, made of alien sounding instruments being piped in through nowhere, began to play at a quiet volume, and Roxy had the distinct feeling she was listening to elevator music as she explored A.

Toilet paper, wet wipes, and a small, bulb-shaped object that she really felt uncomfortable talking about even when she wasn't the last human alive. Four slots. They weren't one to one duplicates, but a little trial and error had let her figure out enough to get by. By the time she had finished looking at her cleaning supplies, there was another soft chime, three notes, low, high, middle, and something warm and pleasant filled the air. When Roxy turned around she could've slapped herself for being so stupid.

It was a menu. She had just ordered food. Obviously.

No utensils that would be of any use, but what she did have was pretty analogous to chopsticks and a spoon, both of which had been blunted of any edges sharp enough to be useful, even if just to pry the door open. Her meal sat upon a flat plate with a raised, very narrow rim, which, somehow, struck her as odd. You tend not to think about plates very often, but most of the plates people used - use had wide edges or a slight interior tilt, wheras the Alternian plate was just a level surface for food to be eaten off of, and a rim to prevent spillage. It looked more like a very poorly made pan than a plate, in all honesty, but when her nose inhaled those scents she realized she hadn't eaten in several days. She took her sweet time poking around, observing, smelling, feeling the heat. It wasn't icy in her room, but without the blanket shawl it wasn't exactly warm, either. Just this little creature comfort made her realize that her heart had been pounding above normal speed for the entirety of the pre-Day 1 days, and now, it was settling. 

The food appeared to be some kind of steak, or at least a rough steak equivalent. It was sort of green-ish, and it didn't have the same kind of marbling or even differentiation that Actual Meat had. There was some kind of gelatinous, central "spoke" to it, almost like the eye in a rib-eye, around which the flesh surrounded, and then a thin, crusted exterior that at least cooked brown like things normally did. If the Alternians somehow ate food without the Maillard Reaction involved in their cooking, Roxy was gonna march up to the Imperial Chef and teach him a thing or goddamn two with her fists. It was easy enough to break apart with the single chopstick, sort of slowly oozing like wet sand, and it wasn't very visually appealing, but the food was food, especially coated in something sticky and yellowish that smelled good. Her spoon was wide and flat, and she hated herself for enjoying the first bite as much as she did.

It wasn't like anything she had ever eaten before, but it also wasn't wet sand. It was like if the concept of a "thick meat smoothie" wasn't somehow completely awful. That was the best thing she had to compare it to. A smoothie. As she chewed, mostly with her tongue, little crackling pieces of something suspended inside the "meat" popped in her mouth not unlike pop rocks, but with a little less bang to them. The sauce more or less completely dissolved in her tongue, and it felt like more of a textural experience than a tasteful one. It was really just bland, with salt, and when she worked her way to the edges of the meat, those were the best parts, with the crispy "skin" providing literally any kind of flavor. She savored what she could get, but she wasn't brave enough to touch the center. Not today. Instead, she moved onto the second object on the plate, which was a thick ribbon of something white and pasty.

Oh, that was just mashed potatoes. Or alien mashed potatoes, whatever. That was good.

The last thing available to her almost felt condescending. She took a sippy cup, completely sealed from the outside, with a narrow "straw" too thin to feed liquid into, and idly wondered how the hell they got juice in there. It was sour, but faintly, like the memory of flat lemon-lime soda, and it made her throat feel nice. She sent the meal back up, and in a minute, the menu returned, but she ignored it. Her stomach was, surprisingly, full. She was clean-shaven, soaped, conditioned, and covered in blankets. She had a pile of pillows underneath her back, and by the time she had begun thinking "Rosie, don't hate me for this... But this is kind of-", she was asleep.


	5. Decimation

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> de·ci·ma·tion  
> /ˌdesəˈmāSH(ə)n/
> 
> the killing or destruction of a **large proportion** of a group or **species**.

By the time Roxy was finally allowed out of her little cage, her own perception of time told her that she was on Day 3. She would've collected the chopsticks she got with her meals and used them for tally marks, but since the cubbies didn't let her take anything with her, she just enjoyed the small creature comforts she was allowed. Each day, the soaps and shampoos on offer had changed in color and scent, some of them fizzier than others. A lot of the scents weren't exactly pleasing to Roxy's nose, but having the variety was useful in other ways. Particularly, it meant that she could cross-reference the letters on each shampoo bottle to the food menu and begin working out translations, although she had to keep them in her head, with no paper to scrawl anything down on. Without anyone else to talk to, she couldn't figure out which letters meant which sounds, but she could still recognize shared letters across them, like the twelve-letter phrase carved into each shampoo bottle, and the six-letter one in the conditioner, presumably, the Alternian words for "Shampoo" and "Conditioner".

She was beginning to get used to the meals, too, which both comforted and disturbed her. There was no consistency to them, as she found out when she tried the same combination of check marks she had picked the other day and noticed immediately that she received an entirely different meal, although the drink provided never changed too much. She was learning a lot about Alternian food, or, at the very least, Alternian fleet cooking. She imagined that normally, that would decrease the quality, but she was also the honored guest of the Empress herself, or some shit like that. So, she supposed it evened out.

Alternian food was all glops and crunches and mushes and crisps - it was made for texture, not for taste. The taste itself seemed incidental, although, thankfully, they at least used salt in their cooking. Her only hypothesis was that Troll tongues had more nerves for touch and less for taste, but that was only a hypothesis for now. Without the ability to read Alternian, she ended up selecting just the first two boxes available on each menu and got something different from the chef each time. Some kind of souffle, more Alternian "meat?", a bowl of soup (She tried to memorize the words for that one, but without notes, it left her head quickly), what was probably an omelet, more Alternian "meat?", some more, and her most recent meal had been a chunky, hearty stew that she also enjoyed far and beyond the others.

But now, she was adjusting to the dimmer light of the Empress's room as her pink hatch slid open. She crawled out like a curious child, ducking her head underneath the door's opening and walking out, leaving behind the relative safety and comfort of her cramped chamber. She had almost forgotten that she was nude, until she saw the Empress standing there in all her wetsuit-coated finery. She waved her hand at Roxy, and Roxy felt something in her brain click into place, like a flipped bit in computer code.

Roxy's eyes widened. Fatigue struck her like a lightning bolt, along with a swirling miasma of dozens of emotions. I'll proceed to rattle a small sample of them off for you: Fear, disgust, hatred, confusion, pain (both emotional and physical), betrayal, sadness, despair, torment, self-loathing, intrigue, shock (and awe), and, finally, rage. Roxy wound up and rammed her fist into the Empress's stomach, enough to drive a small "Oof," out of her.

"Now what was that for, gill?" The Empress responded, barely even moving.

"What point is there in keeping me here if all you're doing is controlling my brain!?" Roxy half-asked, half-screamed, losing her composure as she began wailing uselessly on the Empress, aiming her fists wherever they could land, watching them bounce harmlessly off of her. Roxy was always a strong girl. She did her exercises and lifted her weights and had the sort of natural strength that kept bad people away from her, but as her blows fell and failed to hit their mark, they grew more feeble, until she was just thumping her closed, bruised fists against the Empress's stomach after her five minute tantrum ran her out of energy. "Was anything I thought even my own...?" She asked, almost whimpering, her voice hoarse from the screaming she had just conducted.

When her fists ran out, she took a step closer to the Empress and immediately headbutted her twice before she was frozen in place. The Empress casually snapped her fingers, and Roxy was flung against the wall, feeling her right wrist crunch as she was telekinetically pinned against the wall. The pain hurt like the roaring fire of a furnace, intensified by ash and wind into something capable of warping iron and shaping steel, but she couldn't cry out, her mouth sealed shut. This time, not by her brain, but by powerful telekinesis that dwarfed what she had seen from even the strongest goldbloods. She wanted to scream, but her vocal cords were paralyzed by the force, her wrist being ground into the wall while the rest of her begun to dangle limply by it.

"Of course it was, dummy. I left you alone for two Earth days to relax. From the audit logs, I'd say you've been eatin' well, you've been cleanin' yourself, and you've been sleepin' as a human should. Any comfy feelins you felt in there was your own." The Empress lectured, her eyes narrowed, eyebrows lowered. She mashed Roxy's broken wrist into the wall a little further while her other hand flicked towards the wall, revealing another one of the medical devices that healed her ankle. "What you felt just now was me cullin' any of tha leftover programming I put in your head while I was fuckin' with you." She said, Roxy dangling from the wall like a ragdoll as she was slowly dragged across it. She needed to scream, but her mouth wasn't her own.

The medicalizer opened up to accept Roxy's hand, and the searing pain got white hot, so much worse than she could imagine.

It was the worst pain she had ever felt. Her vision blurred at the edges as she felt her bones knit themselves back together. Her vision went white, but when she felt her consciousness fading, a jolt of alertness shot through her.

There's not a word that can be used in narration to express the noise Roxy made as her mouth finally opened.

It was a sheer, primordial ooze of pain, from which all the other more advanced pains would eventually derive.

Torture in its purest form.

"From here on out, I'm done playing with ya brain." The Empress said, turning away from Roxy with disdain. "Consider this your last day of free roamin'. I've spent too much time trying to please you. I've got my own important, offishal shit to deal with, and you'll be accompanying me." Her bitrident pulled itself off its mount in the wall and into the Empress's hand as the door to her respiteblock slid open and ate her, before sliding shut.

Roxy grabbed her wrist, curled into a ball on the rubbery floor. She shook like a leaf, sobbing hysterically.


	6. Meditation

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> med·i·ta·tion  
> /ˌmedəˈtāSH(ə)n/
> 
> a written or spoken discourse expressing **considered thoughts** on a subject.

Day 7, by her count.

Already, it was beginning to become routine, and the time sunk through her hands like sand. Wake up at the Empress's call. Accompany her to the ablution chamber to wash off the sopor slime she slept in, helping her into her wetsuit, and then following her on her rounds. Once, she went to check on the ship's Helmsman, an experience Roxy could barely tolerate without vomiting. Usually, after that, she went with the Empress to her throne room, where Roxy was forced up into the oversized throne to accompany the Empress like a cat. Sometimes, she was pet, sometimes she was held, sometimes, she was comfortable, but at all times she was nude. Brunch was delivered, with Roxy getting a smaller plate of whatever the Empress had. People flit in and out of the throne room, mostly highbloods, saying something in Alternian to the Empress, who responded in kind. Then, dinner, final rounds, and back to sleep.

She doubted today was going to be any different. Stepping into the bathtub with the Empress, Roxy's eyes locked onto her physique. The Empress slept naked, of course, and her ablution chamber was actually hidden behind a wall connected to her respiteblock. Roxy felt some kind of sick admiration for the Empress, the sheer magnitude of her femininity, her proportions immense even for someone 10 feet tall. Her bathtub was more like a small pool. The Empress's dark skin was splattered with an even layer of gently glowing fuchsia freckles that brightened in the dark, and considering that the Battleship Condescension was populated by nocturnal trolls, the ship was usually always kept in a reasonable state of "dimness", text usually accompanied by some kind of glowing feature.

But in her ablution chamber, the morning temple of cleanliness and relaxation, it was nearly lights out, so her body was silhouetted by those glowing freckles like an abyssal fish. The first time she was forced to clean the Empress, she was clumsy, and every mistake she expected a walloping or another bone broken and healed, but instead received nothing. Not even a tsk or a smack or the slightest telekinetic strangle. Since then, she had gotten better at cleaning in the dark, and seeing. The oversized faucet dumped fresh, slightly saline water, across the Empress's skin, where Roxy got to put her hands every day, much to her chagrin. She learned a lot more about Troll anatomy than her 6 hours of murder had gotten her.

The Empress's grubscars had narrowed and faded with time into sharp, softly pink lines, with only the faintest amount of glow to them. Roxy learned that they were sensitive during her first assassination attempt, as she attempted to beat the Empress with a heavy brush. No retaliation, just the brush ripped out of her hands, and she had to do the rest of the cleaning manually.

She hadn't tried again since.

She figured the three gill-slits on the Empress's neck, normally covered up by her wetsuit, were similarly vulnerable, but her only attempt to even start digging her fingers inside of her were rebutted by telekinesis. So she didn't make a third attempt, not yet. The first order of business was washing off the Empress's sopor slime with a wet rag. The first one was far too big for Roxy to use well, more like a towel, for her, but after Day 5 (the second day of cleaning), she had a much more reasonably proportioned one in her hands. First, her back, the Empress's hair curled over her right shoulder to give Roxy access. A golden, but otherwise simple cup carried water for pouring: scoop, scrub, scoop, scrub, the rag lathering itself in the process. Across the Empress's shoulder blades, up to her shoulders and neck, down her spine. A strictly professional relationship, Roxy saw it as. The Empress wasn't doing any wiggling in delight, just sitting still and taking her cleaning.

Wading into the deep-bottomed bathtub that swallowed her up, Roxy swam to the Empress's front side. She would've considered some other kind of murder attempt, but at this point she felt sure that the Empress could read her thoughts. Even though the Empress's eyes were shut during this part of the day, her reaction speed was always bullet fast. She ran the rag up between the Empress's breasts, up and down, up and down, then around in a wide figure-8, using her cup to let the suds run over the Empress's chest. She still hadn't worked up the desire to clean the Empress's big troll ta-tas, and she doubted she ever would. Scrubbing across her collarbone, she moved on to the Empress's arms and hands, onto her underarms, and then going underwater to help with her lower half.

Despite the context, Roxy took no arousal from this, not even slightly. True to her word, Roxy was reasonably sure that the Empress wasn't brainwashing her anymore. About 80% sure. She knew that Trolls had weird tentacle dicks, but she hasn't seen the Empress's yet, even when she cleaned the area around her big, slightly glowing Troll pussy. Modesty was for non-extinct cultures, and Roxy's sense of modesty had quickly degraded since her arrival on the Battleship Condescension. She still hadn't ventured the risk of directly scrubbing at the Empress's folds with her rag, so when she was done, the Empress usually took a second rag and cleaned all the spots Roxy didn't want to touch, for one reason or another.

Their work was done in silence. Neither one had anything to say to the other, and Roxy never cleaned herself in the Empress's tub, since that was what her own basin was for, with fresh, un-salted water. Curling down, the Empress dunked herself under the water, returning her impossibly large mane of hair to her back as Roxy retrieved the brush. The faucet kept itself running at a slow trickle, taking out sopor-stained water and replacing it with new liquid. The Empress set herself under the faucet, while Roxy hopped up onto the bath's edge. Brush, brush, brush, brush, brush, brush, brush, brush, brush, brush, brush, brush. Occasionally a strand of hair came loose, but only occasionally, even after the Empress splattered 12-lettered shampoo into her hair and began scrubbing it downwards, leaving it up to Roxy to apply the rest of the shampoo. It was a task she had grown used to, but took a startling amount of pride in. Still imbued, she was, with the fear that a mistake could come with joint-shattering retribution.

But the blow never came. It hadn't come in the days before, and Roxy was beginning to doubt that it would come in the future. The running faucet helped drain the bright green, fizzing shampoo out of the Empress's hair, before it was replaced with conditioner, smoother and silkier, with finer, smaller air bubbles roiling out.

Brush, brush, brush, brush, brush, brush, brush, brush. When her hair was lustrous, shiny, and groomed, the Empress stood up, telekinetically dragging over a little footstool for Roxy to step down on, which she did. The Empress was tall enough that climbing out of her bath wasn't an issue for her, and with a flick of her wrist, all the water scattered off from her body, forming into a sphere. She quickly wrung out her hair with a similarly mundane application of her telekinetic powers, returning the water to its place in the bath and shutting off the faucet. Roxy turned to face the Empress, hands folded in front of her stomach, preparing for a collar and leash to be placed on her neck, but that never came either. After thirty seconds of silence, Roxy opened her eyes to look up at the Empress.

"I'm takin' ya off tha leash for now. If you're a bad pet, it goes back on." She summated, simply, efficiently.

"Why?" Roxy asked, similarly simply.

"You've earned it by being a good gill." The Empress answered.

"Oh." Roxy choked, looking down at the ground.


	7. Exculpation

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> exculpate  
> / ˈɛk skʌlˌpeɪt/
> 
> to clear from a charge of **guilt** or fault; free from blame; vindicate.

Inexplicably, Roxy was beginning to memorize the tangled format of the Battleship Condescension's many hallways, crooked and winding as they were. It was no accurate mental map, but more muscle memory, enough that if she began wandering randomly she'd likely end up either in the Empress's respiteblock or the throne room, and straying from the path wasn't an option. As much as she hated her captor and despised her captivity, she was treated well, kept fed, and slept reasonably comfortably, if a bit cramped and curled up. Straying from the garden path ran the possibility of running into wolves, so on the very rare occasions that she was alone, she just waited for the Empress to return. At least with the Empress, she could seemingly guarantee her safety, something not a certainty around one of the ship's many threshecutioners or laughsassins.

Today, she was in her usual position, on the left side of the Empress's throne, idly resting with her head against the Empress's stomach. It wasn't the most comfortable position, but she wasn't interested in lying down in the Empress's lap unless forced to, and although her throne was large, it wasn't large enough to allow the complete avoidance of contact, so she might as well use the pillow while it was there. When there was nobody there, the Empress read on her PDA, her bitrident usually leaned against the right arm of the throne or placed in a slot behind her, the Empress occasionally chuckling throatily, or letting out a contemplative purr or rumble. And, when nobody was there, Roxy existed in that liminal space between sleep and wakefulness, where minutes passed by like seconds, but she could tell that her mouth was open, and probably that she was even snoring somewhat.

But when someone walked into the room, Roxy almost always woke up. Learning Alternian had become a personal goal for hers at this point, if not to help with her escape and possible eventual assassination of the Empress, than to make her stay comfier. Alternian was a strange language that she wasn't sure she'd ever be able to speak, considering what amounted to a second pair of vocal cords nestled under each Troll's sternum-equivalent, but she'd be able to learn to listen, and maybe to read, and that would make the difference. She had pieced together a thing or two from the Empress's PDA, since anyone entering the room could beam relevant documentation to her, and Roxy was smart enough to correlate sounds with symbols when they were repeated often enough, but it was slow going. At her rate of progress, she might finally be able to eavesdrop on a conversation and get some useful information in five or six years.

No time spent waiting was too long.

Today's first meeting was with a man with honey mustard yellow ornamentation to his uniform, and four horns. She had seen mustardbloods before, but usually in grizzly war machines, biomechanically fused to them to act as a psionic battery, so seeing one with normal eyes and normal horns was a bit of a shock. He spoke, and the Empress spoke, and the flow of conversation bounced back and forth. The man left, and the Empress went back to her article for about five seconds, before turning down to face Roxy.

"I bet ya wanna know what we're talkin' about, don't ya?" She said, gently tousling Roxy's shining, silvery-blonde hair. Roxy tried to bare her teeth and growl, doing anything to appear even remotely threatening, but the Empress just laughed her off. "Ya had the face of a wiggler at schoolfeedin'. Thankfully, we've been workin' on a dictionary for ya'."

Roxy narrowed her eyes. "So you're keeping human culture alive somewhere? That doesn't seem very Alternian."

This made the Empress laugh more, and Roxy felt shame lash through her like a whip. "Of course not. Ya culture has nofin of worth ta us. It was your "sibling"'s idea."

Roxy would've doubled over if the emotional shock could be translated into a physical blow, and then the desperation set in. "What? Where's Rose!?" She yelled, standing up on the throne, her voice getting shrill as she almost came eye-to-eye with the Empress.

"Tail end of the fleet wit one of our Jades. She's  _so_ flushed for her it's embarassin'." The Empress clarified, breaking off into a cackle. "A human! Fallin' fin over feet for her jailor! Oh, so fuckin' rich." She trilled, in between heaving laughs, and Roxy's face fell like she was cliffjumping. Rose... in love with a troll? All the fight left Roxy in an instant. Her arms, previously raised up in a boxer-like stance that she assumed when she was ready to get angry at the Empress, which was always, flopped down to her sides, dangling limply until the Empress's laughter bounced off of them like a hammer striking a bell. She sunk down onto her knees, and then buried her face into the Empress's thigh. "Chin up, pet! A'least she's happy, right?"

Roxy felt air building up in her lungs like fuel rods ready to chain react. Her resultant screamsplosion was long, drawn out, and louder than any noise she had made before in her life, her throat buzzing with vibration as she muffled her rage and sadness into the Empress's leg. She raised her hand up and slammed it down, ready to break her own hand against the throne's hard stone this time, only impacting it on muscle under fat under skin under wetsuit.

It didn't hurt enough. She raised up both hands, and began slamming them down on the Empress's thigh, again and again and again and again, alternating between bruising slams and screaming her lungs out.

All of her strength was for nothing. She wasn't feeling it enough. Her noises didn't make any sounds that could be formed into coherent strings of letters, even if they were consecutive vowels. The Empress looked down at her with a mixture of pity and condescension as she wailed away at her leg like it was a pillow being beaten for catharsis, while Roxy choked back sobs, beginning to gag on her own breath. Her body was going numb, starting to shake all over, punch, punch, punch, punch, her knuckles didn't hurt enough, the sides of her hands didn't hurt enough.

She needed to make her insides and her outsides match, to equalize the pressure from one simple sentence causing her world to implode. When she brought her head up from the Empress's leg to suck in air, her face was a mess, snot leaking from her nose, eyes bruised by the sheer force of her tantrum spiral. She let out an anguished wail, and when the Empress tried to pat her head, Roxy smacked away her palm with enough force to actually put a shocked expression on her face.

" _Don't touch me!_ " She shrieked, having to pause for breath mid-way through. The noises her body were making were alien to her, as she sniffled and gasped, heaving for air. " _You gave up on us!_ " She roared, reeling her hand back and preparing to crack her fingers on the throne, before she was redirected at the last possible second into punching the Empress's hip. Roxy didn't care. Her knuckles didn't hurt enough yet, so she could keep going. " _You gave up on me!_ " She screamed, grabbing hold of the closest object (the Empress's hip) and pulled her head back, ready to begin beating her skull bloody against the taller troll.

"No more." The Empress commanded, and Roxy immediately passed out.

 

 

 

 

She awoke what felt like days later to an unfamiliar ceiling. One of her thin blankets, the pink one she slept with all the time, was draped over her body. Two trolls, one tealblood with long, straight horns that jutted out of the side of her head, and one oliveblood with blunt, rounded horns, were examining something on a holographic PDA of their respective blood colors. One of them said something to the other in Alternian, and Roxy tried to move, but her arms disobeyed her, and the pain suddenly hit her. Well, more of a soreness than pain, which she was at least mildly thankful for once she noticed the strange looking IV plugged into her right arm. She took a look at her knuckles, bruised but not scraped, and tried bending her fingers, but they barely reacted to her commands. She saw a medicalizer hanging from the wall, a desk, charts, diagrams of Troll bodies, the usual stuff for what she assumed was an infirmary.

Her face hurt. When she tried to say something to her two attendants, all that came out was a dry croak, until the oliveblood supplied her with a sippy cup like the one she got at meals in her cage. She tried to hold it in her hands, but her fingers didn't want to close on it right, and the oliveblood silently grabbed hold of the bottom to help tilt it down Roxy's throat. The tealblood came over, drawing out the corners of their PDA, and using a small baton to point to what were plainly x-rays of Roxy's hands. The tealblood said a couple of words in Alternian, but it was clear that Roxy wasn't getting them, and the tealblood was probably using them more out of force of habit. Roxy got the picture nonetheless - diagrams were universal. She had sprained her wrists and crushed several blood vessels in her hands, but the worst of the damage was an easy fix for Alternian medical biotech. It felt like more of a chastising than a chart-showing, even though she couldn't understand them.

Roxy didn't know why, but she began crying. The oliveblood looked nervous, gently patting Roxy's numb hand, while the tealblood looked a little more panicked than nervous. Roxy gestured for her wrist, and tapped it a couple of times - surely they had watches? But the oliveblood was confused. Roxy rubbed her chin slowly in thought, and then made a hoarse noise to get the oliveblood's attention. She pointed to herself, and then curled over to feign sleeping, and then held out one finger. And then, she did it again, holding out two fingers, and then three, before tapping her wrist impatiently. How could they not tell she wanted a clock? The oliveblood looked down at the ground and then squeaked out an apologetic word, not knowing how to answer her question, until the tealblood rapped on the nearest desk to get Roxy's attention. There, now we were getting somewhere. She put both hands together, as in prayer, put them to the side of her face, and then started mock-snoring. She set her fingers apart, and then traced an arc in the sky with her fist - the moon? Was she in the infirmary overnight?

Roxy made the same motion, moving one hand into a fist and tracing it along an arc in the sky, stopping it half-way. The tealblood shook their head, starting the gesture over until it was all the way in the other hand, and then made the faux-sleep charade again. So, Roxy had been in the infirmary overnight. She slapped her moon-fist into the palm of a completed night, and the tealblood nodded with a wry smile. Roxy stretched out a little, and then immediately regretted the action when soreness shot through her body. She tapped at the IV in her arm, and the oliveblood went to look at it, but before he could pull it out of her, Roxy stopped them. Pointing to the IV bag, she made sure the oliveblood knew what she was aiming for, and then pulled her finger back to point to herself, before miming sleep in the same way that the tealblood did.

At least morphine seemed universal. Grabbing a small, bug-like syringe from one of the tables, the oliveblood left the room for a hot minute, only to return with a syringe full of diluted, liquid greenish-blue, not even close to the same shade as sopor. He found the port on the IV bag and slowly introduced the liquid, earning a thumbs up and a weak smile from Roxy. The oliveblood smiled back, giving her a cheerful gesture as he emptied the syringe in, and in minutes, Roxy felt darkness overtaking her.


	8. Crystallization

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> crystallization  
> / ˌkrɪs tl əˈzeɪ ʃən /
> 
> the act of giving **definite or concrete form** to:

"Idiot gill," The Empress snarled, looming over the stiff, still Roxy Lalonde. "Roxy, right?" Roxy stared down at her feet, curled up on the ground, sitting between the hatch that separated her respiteblock from the Empress's. "I've never called ya by your name yet, but it's Roxy, isn't it?"

"Yeah." She hissed hoarsely. Her eyes, once shining and luminous and brightly fired with rebellion like a perfect gemstone, were dull and without shimmer or gleam. Her face was broken out in red splotches, particularly around her eyes, where her fierce crying had burst most of the thinner blood vessels, making it look like she had been given a shiner on each side of her head. Her knees were pressed up to her chest, arms wrapped loosely around her ankles. "I guess it is." She said, hoping that the hatch would close on her and split her in half. Nothing felt worse than being pitied by the destroyer of mankind.

"I don't understand you." The Empress said, shaking her head, one hand on her forehead and the other on her hip. At this point, expecting to be struck or kicked or beaten or even just telekinetically pulled like a marionette was out of the question. Roxy knew that the Empress was loathe to hit her, and she didn't understand why. "What moray do ya want?"

"I want my planet back," Roxy said, quietly and succinctly.

"And what good will that do? If ya really want it, I'll put ya on an escape pod and launch ya there, but we ate all the oceans and trees, and there ain't nobody left. Will goin' back return everythin' ta normal?" The Empress asked, kneeling down on her bare, wetsuit-covered feet, heels having since been discarded. Roxy's bruised knuckles and fingers were wrapped in tightly fitted bandages that she wasn't able to take off herself, for one reason or another.

"No." Roxy responded, feeling stupider by the second.

"Right, it won't. Like it or not, this is your life now."

Roxy exhaled sharply. She hated that the Empress was right.

"It's time ta start gettin' over things. We kept about two billion'ya humans cuz ya make cute pets. And it's better this way." She said, reaching out for Roxy slowly. When Roxy didn't slap her hand away, she gently put it over Roxy's shoulder, holding her in the coldness of her grip. "Your species was young and impoverished. Ya took too long gettin' out of tha gate, so ya got eaten by a bigger fish. That's how stuff works in the stars. Be thankful that ya got eaten by the biggest fish around."

"I hope you're not seriously suggesting we thank you for this?" Roxy responded. Even with the light out of her eyes, her skepticism rang clear.

"Of course I am. Even the lowest rustie in the fleet can feed their pet, keep 'em amused with trinkets and doodads, give 'em shelter an' comfort. What do you humans need to do fer it?" She pointed out, gently rubbing Roxy's exposed shoulder. Roxy hated that she knew the answer immediately.

"Nothing."

"Yeah. Nofin." The Empress lectured. "The only reason you don't have knickknacks is because I can't be shore ya won't hurt yourself with 'em. I'm tryin' ta keep ya alive, damnit!" Roxy would've preferred sinking into the ground and falling into the void of space. "You're like a lusus during breeding season. You're angry and bitchy and I don't know what'll get ya to clam down and stop hurting yourshellf. I'm trying  _so_ hard to make ya happy, fer fucks sake."

The room was full of silence, swallowing up every corner of it. The Empress let go of Roxy and stood up, shaking her head. Beyond her fuchsia eyes was pity and sadness. "Lashin' out at me won't turn tha clock back. No matter how angry you get. Either live with it, or don't."


	9. Bastardization

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> bas·tard·ize  
> /ˈbastərˌdīz/
> 
>  **change (something)** in such a way as to lower its quality or value, typically by **adding new elements**.

Her single necklace glistened, hanging loosely underneath the bottom of her throat, as Roxy played with her bright, bubblegum-pink holo-PDA. Special settings, just for the Empress's "pet", a term she still somewhat resents, with a twenty-four-hour clock and a calendar working off her personal Day 1. By those metrics, meticulously made by mustardblooded mechanics, it was Day 15 of her captivity, although in the passing days she had come to think of it less as captivity and more of a temporary holding. Despite her extensive tongue-lashing by the Empress herself, she still held out hope that the two billion humans taken alive would kick into high-gear, slay their captors, and send the Alternian war machine diving into the nearest star.

Still, she figured she could enjoy the amenities while she was here. Her personal education in Alternian script was slow going, but she could at least read the words that translated into Shampoo and Conditioner, which, when translated back, were more like "keratin cleansing liquid" and "keratin lubricant". Speaking the language was out of the question, considering she lacked the dual set of vocal cords that the Trolls possessed, but she could read it better than her wild guesses. Alternian was a language sort of like German (which she was passingly familiar with, and no longer existed) - when you needed to make a new word, you slammed two existing words together, and people generally understood what you meant until it became its own word: Squawk Beast. Keratin Cleansing Liquid. Chitin Surfactant. And so on.

So, brute forcing her way into the language by learning it via memorizing the human-Alternian dictionary wasn't out of the question. Rose was making steady updates, although Roxy was told that contacting her sister was out of the question, and that her sister similarly couldn't contact her, which stung when she thought about it but mostly put it behind her. Alternian was like other languages in other ways, too, being read right-to-left like Japanese and Hebrew. There were about 24 or so different letters, with vowels represented by dots placed in strategic locations compared to the original letter, although words that were spelled similarly tended to be related with or without vowels involved. You could have two vowels on a single word, which indicated using both vocal cords to pronounce it

Grammatically, it was definitely a little alien but nothing unlearnable. First, you had to take into account the blood status of the speaker - when the sentence only involved the speaker, it was based on which chunk of the Hemocaste you were in. Fuchsias, Violets, Purples, and Indigos all came first, Ceruleans, Teals, Jades, and Olives were centered in the middle of the sentence, and Golds, Bronzes, and Burgandies were placed at the back end of the sentence (and as the pet of a Fuchsia, Roxy was considered, grammatically speaking, a Fuchsia-blooded troll). Alternian sentences always involved at least one person, which at bare minimum was the speaker, and, to oversimplify for sake of narrative speed, were formatted with the verb on the tail end of the nouns. For sake of example, which Roxy went over often, saying the relatively simple sentence of "Roxy ate a grubstake" would be instead phrased as "Roxy's grubsteak was eaten by her.", with tenses applied appropriately - "Roxy's grubsteak will be eaten by her", perhaps. And, for further example, if Roxy was owned by a Jadeblood (as Rose was, something she thought about similarly often), the sentence instead becomes "A grubsteak that belongs to Rose was eaten by her." - and, God forbid, a rustblood, "A grubsteak is eaten by its owner, Rose."

Troll etiquette. Super simple stuff.

Highbloods get [Subject] [object] [verb], Midbloods get [object] [Subject] [verb], and Lowbloods get [object] [verb] [subject]. Roxy mumbled out loud, her sentences taking on mild affectations as she stared at her worksheet, another little privilege drafted up by the same designers behind her holo-PDA. At this point, the Empress had a pair of overeager computer engineers willing to wait on Roxy's educational needs, because the Empress ordered them to. One of them had a crush on the Empress's pale, exotic looking pet, and the other appreciated the challenge behind having to construct a schoolfeeding regimen for an alien who didn't even possess the biological ability to speak Alternian (although that didn't stop Roxy from trying - she did, after all, know the basic 24 noises, and the vowels were just A, E, I, O, and U).

Meanwhile, her studies taught, if two trolls addressed each other, the sentence was much simpler. [Higher Blood Color Subject] [object] [verb] [Lower Blood Color Subject]. "Roxy's grubsteak was previously owned by Rose", for example, but even if the situation (of owning another person's grubsteak) was reversed, it would still remain in the same order: "Roxy's previously owned grubsteak is now owned by Rose.". In the not uncommon case of two tied people, each person just put their own name in the front end of the sentence. Roxy thought it was interesting that even though they lacked a second or first person grammar structure, even implicitly, the Empress was still capable of conversing with her not only conversationally but more or less fluently, which Roxy figured might've been some kind of psychic whosit. It wasn't really necessary for her to figure out that mechanism, since it's not like it would help her find out any information that might help her planned rebellion.

The necklace hanging on her neck was the closest thing to clothes that she had been wearing in the past two weeks, and at this point, she had, for the most part, really stopped caring about her nudity. Not to say that her sense of modesty had degraded, but it had definitely disappeared into the aether. Golden little rounds about the size of a nickel but five times as thick was threaded through, two in a row before an elegantly crafted false seashell, the chain continuing all the way around to the magnetic clasp at the back of the necklace. At the center of the necklace lay a larger golden medallion maybe the size of a silver dollar pancake that rested on her sternum comfortably, the necklace itself crafted from some kind of woven silver material that, nonetheless, looked like a perfectly smooth strand all the way around.

The Empress, she supposed, trusted her enough to not strangle herself with the necklace. Or try to strangle her, or whip her.

On some level, that probably should've disturbed her greatly, but she was too busy focusing on her schoolfeeding regarding slightly more advanced sentence structures to care. Her body was bereft of hair, kept smooth and clean by her daily washing and "shaving", while her wavy bob had lost some of its straightenings as it grew in length ever so slowly, has started to turn into a wavier bob. Running off the assumption that the entirety of the ship's structure, or most of it, was made out of some kind of reconfigurable material (which was a likely assumption, considering the state of Alternian material sciences as she could see them), a requested expansion to her personal bedchamber had been allowed as of Day 10, giving her, finally, room to sleep with her back completely straight, a luxury she felt a large measure of joy in finally acquiring.

Her daily bathing with the Empress had grown similarly banal as the rest of her routine. Knowing now that troll breasts were only barely erogenous zones, more akin to feet for humans (i.e, sometimes wired like that, but usually not), being able to wash the Empress's mighty bust was one of her next major accomplishments, done for the first time on Day 12. Thankfully for her sense of shame, atrophied as it were, the Empress was not one of those trolls who seemed to get off on having her rumble spheres played with, even as Roxy somewhat roughly scrubbed sopor off of the Empress's human-head-sized tits.

Still working on getting to her nook, though. Roxy still wasn't ready for that.

Putting on her necklace (Day 11) had become quickly enmeshed in the rest of her daily routine, the cool metal helping to wake her up before adjusting to her body, as was relaxing on several pillows requisitioned (Day 10) for the throne for her use. There was enough space for the Empress that she didn't mind the space Roxy occupied, as long as Roxy didn't freak out or try to hurt herself or anything like that. Roxy was just... There, now. Like a cat. Sometimes, the Empress reached over to pet Roxy's hair or pull her into her thigh, actions that Roxy always resisted but slightly less when she did it today than yesterday. She didn't even really get second glances so long as she was working on her work. Roxy was learning fast, but there wasn't a ton else to do on the throne.

Stretching out, she leaned back, letting her legs flop out and open off the throne, barely scraping against the ground. Not like there were any plans to use her ~~nook~~ puss for anything, so she might as well air it out, kick her legs a little like she was swimming in a pool, enjoying the gentle breeze of the throne room. She only idly listened as a goldblood came in to say something. Something about "The Empress's codeworms are growing beautifully this perigee, tended to by [Name Here]", or some self effacing thing like that, the Empress typically replying in kind. There were so many people on this ship that trying to remember their names wasn't really for Roxy right now.

Day 15.

She was beginning to realize that, despite her amenities, she was still depressed.

No, not depressed.

She was lonely.


	10. Lexicalization

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> lexicalize  
> / ˈlɛk sɪ kəˌlaɪz /
> 
> the process of **adding** words, set phrases, or word patterns to a **language**.

It was Day 24, and she had not given up. Two small chains hung off her hips, crossed at the middle, and her largest necklace had been joined by a small, thin choker with 12 bright pink beads, small and glassy, evenly scattered across it. A golden bracelet on the wrist of her right hand. Her holo-PDA, folded into its small, credit-card sized form, was clutched tightly in her left hand like it was a lifeline, her only connection to Rose.

The other day, she had learned about her other friends.

Dirk and Jade had been slain in the rebellion, an announcement that returned her rebellious spirit for just so long as it took for her to begin screaming, a tirade of fury and fucks aimed squarely at the Empress. When calmness was forced into her brain, she decided to grieve the rest of the day. The Empress didn't stop her as she hopped off the throne, got lost in the hallways, and had to be directed to her respiteblock by a friendly indigoblood. The doors opened for her for the first time, both to the Empress's room, where she decided to rip all of her modern art/torture devices off the walls and throw them into her captor's recuperacoon, and the door to her own respiteblock, where she walked in, found her favorite pink and white pillow and continued venting her grief to the world in the form of muffled noises.

The rest of the information came with dinner. Dave had been sent to an advance fleet elsewhere in the galaxy, pet to a threshecutioner of some renown. John was sent to an ecumenopolis to be the legal assistant, and probably plaything, of a legislacerator. Jake was now the legal property of a rustblooded telekinetic laborer with exceptionally high performance, and Roxy was told that she loved him deeply (but was told this information in a way clearly intended to mock the rustblood, which caused her to burn a little inside). Jane became a subjugglator's minder on a nursery planet, technically under the employ of someone known as the Grand Highblood, but given, according to the Empress, a "distressing amount of freedom". And Rose...

Rose was doing just fine.

Her dictionary was getting bigger each day.

Roxy knew. She was reading it all the time.

It was almost like talking to her.

Roxy didn't even have to clean up the stuff she knocked off the walls. When she emerged, a day later, eyes covered in dark circles, she was met by an empty room, with the art pieces restored to their rightful place and gleaming clean with new spitshine. It was past the time that she should've cleaned up the Empress of her sopor, and the fact that she was alone in this room for her morning routine made her feel something in her chest that she couldn't give a name to. She walked up to the wall where the ablution chamber was hidden behind, and the wall slid open to reveal off-turned lights and no Empress. Something about it made her heart hurt. Why? She still hated the Empress. Keep reminding yourself that, Roxy.

She vaguely knew where things were. She could make her way to the elevators on her own now. She had never seen the engine room, but she was sure she could find it if she needed to. Maybe she'd go do something awful to the Helmsman, and that'd be the start of her rebellion. No. She couldn't do that to him. The impulsive idea dismissed itself as soon as it made itself known. She wasn't sure where her feet were taking her, because the path was only sort of to the throne room, so maybe she was sightseeing, or maybe she was heading to the infirmary.

She was heading to the infirmary. Nobody stopped her, even the numerous trolls she passed by, but she heard their words, translating them back into her head in English. They all spoke, for the most part, with those vocal cords set in their chests, the culturally accepted way to whisper, as she passed them by. "The Empress's Pet's swift motions are witnessed by [Name Here]" Someone whispers to someone else, respectfully. Even the violetbloods speak to her like this now. Someone tried to accost her, once, and she never saw them again on her morning walks with the Empress. "The Empress's Pet's anger is true, as asked by [Name Here]?" Someone asked, and she ignored them. It was ridiculous to be thinking about her grammar schoolfeeding right now.

The infirmary was sparsely populated, since combat tended not to happen too often on battleships, especially not the Empress's. Lowblood rooms were crowded with bunk-cots, and the midbloods got the typical hospital two-to-a-room, and highbloods got one cot per room. Twelve rooms (trolls seemed to enjoy that number), 6 on each side of one hallway, attached to the edge of what was essentially an office/waiting room, with emergency suites presumably in a back. She was sure if she counted out all the rooms she'd find some multiple of twelve in the number of beds, but now wasn't the time for compulsive math. An unfamiliar brownblood looked at Roxy nervously as she walk/stomped past, and she waved her hand at each door, trying to look for the tealblood and oliveblood that had tended to her earlier.

She found them tending to some midblood. Another oliveblood. She walked in, her jewelry gently rattling, and pulled out her holo-PDA, quickly dragging it open to its full size. Typing wasn't something she engaged in often, but it was still not as hard as it should've been. Tapping on a letter produced one with the neutral vowel, the dot in the center. When you flicked your finger to one of the four corners, it made a letter with the dot in the correct corner, and the computer attempted to guess the correct front letter (the only one, she learned, which had two vowels, per word) for the word. Considering the state of Alternian natural language parsing technology, Roxy never had to manually correct it.

"Roxy's joy could be given with names." She TAKA-TAKA'd out. Amusingly, the touch-screen keyboard noises across species were more or less identical. She showed her big letters to the tealblood when they didn't look overly concerned with the condition of their patient. "Roxy's anger is currently existent. Roxy's sadness is currently active." Curse her limited vocabulary, she sounded like a robot. It sounded so much more natural to her ears than when she read it.

"The Empress's Pet's joy is earned by exchange of names with Kuulba Mantid." The tealblood - Kuulba - said, before coughing and thumping her chest twice through her dark grey doctor's clothes. "The Empress's Pet's negative emotions are acknowledged, and a solution is requested by Kuulba Mantid."

That didn't really make Roxy feel any better, but she put up a smile nonetheless. "Roxy's request is embracing from Kuulba Mantid. Roxy's sadness is __" She said, and then stopped typing, looking at her fingers, looking at her palms, and the holo-PDA screen. She wasn't struck with any sort of magic revelation, just a sickeningly deep sense that something was wrong with her. She didn't know why she was typing in Alternian glyphs, in Alternian grammar, wearing her Alternian jewelry almost proudly - she grabbed it and ripped it off of her neck, magnetic clasps coming loose with a sharp tug. And she was aboard an Alternian ship trying to get comfort from an Alternian doctor. The pet of an Alternian. She threw all her necklaces and chains on the ground, and stared at her knees once she fell on them.

Kuulba came up to her and bent down to scoop them up, grabbing and folding up her holo-PDA into its credit-card form. She pulled Roxy up from the ground, earning no resistance from the captive human. Roxy walked, dragged along by Kuulpa to one of the empty highblood rooms, and helped up onto a bed. She recognized the view and orientation of the cot, its comfort, from a subconscious, drug-addled memory. Kuulba was ratty and underslept, with short, strangled hair that came up and across her head in strands, slicked back tight, and deep teal irises far darker in pitch than the teal she had seen on others. She was a little taller than Roxy, semirectangular horns with three identically sized horns placed down them, like some kind of monolith, or a brick, a golden ring placed through the topmost hole on her right horn. Her nails, unlike most trolls, were trimmed close to the nailbed. Roxy noticed all these things as she hyperventilated, trying to take in details to avoid freaking out more than she already was.

Kuulba gently pet the back of Roxy's right hand with both of her own, running her thumbs across Roxy's pale skin. She was so pale, she noticed almost immediately. She didn't know if the lights in her respiteblock were sunlamps or anything of the sort, but she was sure if a vitamin D deficiency would be at risk, the Empress would somehow find a way around it. Kuulba spoke slowly, almost whispering but with both vocal cords. Something in Roxy immediately wanted to slap her for that, for yelling at the pet of the Empress, but it wasn't like her volume was actually loud enough to constitute yelling at Roxy, and it wasn't like Roxy was internalizing her role as the Empress's pet, being called that day in and day out whenever she was addressed by someone else. "Roxy's moirail is nonexistent, as seen by Kuulba." She spoke, sternly, yet informally, with her yell-whispered double voice.

"A what?" Roxy asked immediately, in English, and then got angry at herself for doing so. At least her tone seemed to be recognizable enough, although Kuulba narrowed her eyes and shook her head with something that was either sadness or pity.

"Roxy's pale red quadrant isn't filled, thinks Kuulba. Roxy's emotional support scaffold [System? Roxy thought] lacks integrity, internal emotions lack proper venting, surmises Kuulba." She said, and then hopped up onto the bed next to Roxy.

Having someone sit with her that was her size felt comforting in a way that the Empress had never been yet. When Kuulba's hands reached Roxy's tamed, mid-neck length hair, running through them with leathery, yet smooth fingers, Roxy felt her body relax without any mind control involved. She leaned on Kuulba's shoulder and tears flowed freely, while Kuulba whistled with her top set of vocal cords, gently rubbing the back of Roxy's hand with her own free one. "A licensed moiraillegience specialist, Kuulba Mantid is registered as. A surgeon, Kuulba is as well." She whispered softly, chuckling, some of the words clipped by the fact that she was still shooshing Roxy with her throat while speaking from her chest, her voice soothingly deep. Roxy's breathing almost spasmed, intensifying for handfuls of breaths before calming down.

Roxy turned around to bury her face into Kuulba's labcoat. It smelled almost like her own, from when she interned at her local lab. She remembered, vaguely, being schoolfed about the quadrants, but troll society wasn't really something she cared about, just their language. She tried hissing something, but then reached for her holo-PDA, folded up, and kept firmly out of her grasp by Kuulba. "A very good friend, Kuulba explains to the alien." She said, pre-empting Roxy's question - so Roxy puts her hand back down on Kuulba's lap. "An official registration, Kuulba will put in."

Roxy swallowed thickly and pressed her face further into Kuulba's coat. 

Was this happy?


	11. Appropriation

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ap·pro·pri·a·tion  
> /əˌprōprēˈāSH(ə)n/
> 
> the action of taking something **for one's own use** , typically without the owner's permission.

Roxy returned to the throne from her mediculler recommended, twice-a-week (but with provisions for more) moiraillegience session, feeling revitalized and refreshed from two hours of papping and shooshing. It wasn't fair to say things had been "patched up" between her and the Empress, namely because Roxy didn't see that there was any sort of relationship to patch. As far as she was concerned, she still hated the Empress, and was here as a captive, not as a willful pet or servant. She still hadn't lowered herself to cleaning the Empress's shining nook of sopor slime in the morning.

She could fall to despair when she reached that point. That would mean it was over.

But whatever happened between her and the Empress, she at least enjoyed the presence of her doctor-assigned moirail. Talking was slow, but she was using the poor sap as a pump to get more information that she could use, in her eventual rebellion. For example, did you know that trolls have a system of four kinds of romances, and that moiraillegience is one of them? Wild! Also of note was the fact that the concept of "prescriptions" didn't exist, only mediculler mandates (for things you need to remain living), and mediculler recommendations (for things that you don't need, but should have). The only person that could override a mandate was the Empress, but that probably didn't stop some highbloods from trying.

Her doctor-assigned moirail was selected after, supposedly, an extensive search of the ship's records and then two in-person interviews with Kuulba, and when she got to meet him, Roxy was overjoyed. Dorsat Erethi, rustblooded archeradicator. Supposedly, this sort of position wasn't really meant for lowbloods, which Roxy supposed explained his constant nervousness, but from what she was told, his combat performance with a longbow far exceeded that of even his higherblooded peers. Eh. Whatever. Roxy didn't care about the hemocaste that much, considering it didn't seem to really apply to her.

Dorsat was nervous, all the time - a long mane of straight black hair that went straight down the back of his head, tapering off between his shoulder blades, and a flowering, branching horn that ended in a three-way-split at the tip. He was a head shorter than Roxy and could probably snap her neck at a moment's notice with his ridiculous archer strength, but instead, all he wanted to do was hug Roxy, and braid her hair (like his was, sometimes), and gossip. 

That was fine, though. Roxy loved to gossip.

Gossip made her feel normal.

For example, the doctor she had seen and was mandated to check up with every perigee for a "pale health check" (which, with added context, was pretty much equivalent to a mental health check), Kuulba Mantid, was fucking her nurse, Chelyd Sudtet, the apologetic oliveblood who had knocked her out on her behest about a month ago. While that would've been scandalous, if probably a bit unsurprising, in a human context, the real tea was that both of them were openly pailing with other people outside of their matespritship. Jostun Opaken, the indigo ruffiannihilator that Dorsat claimed as a kismesis, which she understood to mean "Dorsat's hate-girlfriend", had been propositioned by the good doctor for a casual pailing after fixing a medicalizer-induced injury enhancement.

Spicy! Apparently, she took Kuulba up on the offer. Normal human gossip almost seemed boring by comparison, with only one romantic arrangement and one kind of friendship to collate, but with trolls, there was a whole spectrum of conflicts to explore, and Dorsat kept her up-to-date with all of it. She had begun to learn names, form a complicated network of people in her head. She even began to sympathize a bit. Dorsat was hate-fucking Jostun who had a fling with Kuulba, but Kuulba was already in a matespritship and didn't want to full-on-cheat, but Jostun had caught feelings and had tried to pull another tealblood in one of the other infirmaries only to get shot down, and now Dorsat and Jostun were having great hate-sex but Jostun was getting a bit too aggressive, but, get this, her ship assignment put her moiraillegience specialist as... Kuulba!

Roxy had begun to even look forward to the gossip. Cuddling with someone her own size, weaving hair, telling stories (or listening to them), and sometimes if she was having a bad day she'd get a good cry out. For the most part, Dorsat was the kind of person who needed to babble to stay sane, and Roxy made an excellent, receptive babbling target. Dorsat seemed especially excited about the long fishtail braid she had turned his hair into during their second session, apparently a style of weaving that he had never even considered before, and talked endlessly today about how many compliments (some of which Roxy realized were backhanded, but who was she to ruin his fun?) he was receiving about it.

"You're in a good mood today, gill." The Empress stated as Roxy hopped up onto the throne, her necklaces jingling like bells with the motion. She had long since upgraded in amount, losing count (7? 8?), but it was certainly enough gold (with hints of pink and fuchsia) to cover most of her sternum. Each wrist held three simple gold hoops that often rattled against each other when she walked, like some kind of announcer forecasting her arrival, and two chains crossed her stomach, hanging onto her hips for dear life. Dorsat had painted her nails a shiny, shiny black the first time they met, and she had kept the color ever since.

"Yeah? What, does that bother you?" Roxy snipped back, scooting into the corner of the throne furthest away from the Empress's leg, as difficult as that was.

"No, it actually makes me reely happy to see my lil' pet happy." She replied, giving Roxy's hair a muss and tussle. Roxy protectively grabbed at her long braided bang, trying to prevent the Empress from undoing it. Thankfully, she was successful in that regard. "I'm reel glad." She said, looking down at Roxy. With all those sharp teeth, Roxy couldn't detect a hint of sincerity in her captor's smile, nor understand why. It wasn't like Roxy was happy for the Empress. She was happy because she had a moirail now and that moirail let her type out her personal problems and gave her an exceptionally warm shoulder to cry on when she needed it. Roxy was happy for herself. "Glad you're adjusting." She finished.

"I'm not adjusting, I'm gathering information so I can kill you." Roxy snarked, pulling her legs up to her chest. She was adjusting, as much as she hated to admit it. She was even pent up enough that she had begun masturbating in the privacy of her respiteblock, something she had promised herself early on she wouldn't get to, in order to keep her mind focused on the eventual rebellion - but once it began interfering with her day-to-day thoughts, she figured she might as well get it over with. She hadn't tried the nookworm again, but every day her eye brushed across it. A part of her hated that she was considering it.

"Shore, shore. Whaddever you say, pet." The Empress replied, dismissively, as Roxy went back to her schoolfeeding.

At her request, new lessons had been added into the mix of AI-generated teaching plans. Namely, teaching her a wiggler's level view of the four romances.

And troll copulatory mechanics.

It would be useful to know.


	12. Condensation

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> con·den·sa·tion  
> /ˌkänˌdenˈsāSH(ə)n/
> 
> the **conversion** of a vapor or gas to a liquid.

Today, Roxy got to have a little party held at her behest.

She, of course, insisted otherwise, since "60th day of being captured by  ~~the enemy~~ Alternians" wasn't really something she saw as super "party-worthy", but a couple of people disagreed. The Empress was not one of them. Something about twelve times five as an auspicious occasion, since Alternian Formal Numerals (as opposed to the  _vastly_ more commonly used and familiar Alternian Casual Numerals, aka Base Ten) were in Base Twelve, and Alternians had five fingers on a hand. Apparently, it was a maritime tradition usually held by Violetbloods to celebrate new crewmembers on their 60th day of being a crewmember without dying, and due to the general Seadweller dominion of the Alternian heirarchy, that tradition had more or less spread out to the entire Alternian military command structure. 60th-Day celebrations were usually held simultaneously for new "recruits", as a big jamboree (separated by caste, of course).

So, in its own weird way, Roxy supposed that made her a crewmember? For some reason, she felt flattered. They had to find a more or less empty training room for her, of course, but a training room in the Battleship Condescension's bow was better than no room. A small handful of the people she had met in the past two months were there - Kuulba, and her matesprit, Chelyd, as well as Dorsat, and even Jostun, a gigantic muscle-wall of a girl that Dorsat had recently vacillated into the red with after what Roxy was informed was a long and arduous auspiticization process. The two Goldblood engineers that had set up her holo-PDA (Mirrod and Phyrex, respectively), and, interestingly enough, a Jadeblood named Duowei that, as Roxy found out on Day 47, was  _actually_ the one setting up her various schoolfeeding lessons, aided by Rose's dictionary, once they had moved beyond the basics of Alternian Grammar and into Formal Numbers, Caste-Appropriate Rhetoric, and History. 

Duowei intrigued Roxy, mainly due to the fact that Rose's  ~~captor~~ owner was  _also_ a Jadeblood. Not to make generalizations, but Roxy thought that if all of them were as pretty as Duowei, she could almost understand it. She was also intrigued by the fact that each ship only ever had 2-3 Jadebloods at a time, mostly as archivists or secretaries, for reasons that nobody wanted to tell Roxy. Roxy was fed, she was given soda that tasted strikingly familiar and yet infinitely strange to her calmed palate (it was far too sweet), and then each one of  ~~her friends~~ the trolls she had met gave her a very light slap. She could tell most of them were holding back, but Roxy wasn't really feeling up to physical abuse anyway. As for the food, Roxy definitely had a favorite at this point - the name was far too unwieldy to regularly say, but it essentially boiled down to "Slow-Cooked and then Blended Cholerbear Larvae", one of those same foods that had comforted her during her earliest days on the Battleship, and one she had initially confused for a stew. She could eat that for  _hours_.

And, on several occasions, she had. The slightest paunch that had formed on her stomach, and the way her jewelry hung just a little bit different off her tits had attested to that, but the change was so slow and so insidious she didn't notice until her Empress pointed it out. Self-consciousness was, however, something like modesty: it was for non-extinct cultures. With nobody around to judge her, Roxy ate as much as she wanted when she wanted to. It wasn't like anyone was forcing her, but there weren't snack sized portions to nosh on at night, and she always felt bad about wasting the chef's effort. Originally, she was waffling between whether or not there was a chef or if it was automated, and then she met the (head) chef, and that made her feel even worse about potentially wasting food.

But that was all about an hour ago. She was allowed to take the day off from throne duty by the Empress's lap (which she would've spent probably napping on the Empress's leg anyway), and even the Empress arrived, gave her a light pat on the head instead of a celebratory slap, and then escorted her out after letting her say goodbye and thank everyone.

Roxy feared the worst. She feared a tongue-lashing, or maybe more telekinetic violence like she had experienced in her first week. She feared and feared all the way to the ablution chamber, and that's where she was now. Roxy stared at her feet, feeling ashamed. Had she done something wrong? She vocalized her thought, to recieve a laughter in return.

"Of course naut, gill. It's your 60th-day present." She said, tossing her bitrident backwards lazily, before telekinetically pressing it into its space on the wall, just because she could. "What'd'ya think I wouldn't respect an old trafishin like that?"

"And my present is...?" Roxy replied, unable to hide the ever-present snark in her voice that emerged purely around her Empress, looking up at her with an eyebrow quirked.

"Spa treatment." The Empress answered, her wetsuit falling off. "I mean, you've been pamperin' me each day for two months. I figured its time ta return the favor."

"Oh. Okay." Roxy replied, kind of dumbfounded, as she began to pull all her jewelry off in neat, contained piles. Her seven rings (four on one hand, three on the other), a small ring on her, uh, ring toe?, enough necklaces and chokers that she had both stopped taking count and started thinking of them more like a shirt, her tiny handful of hip chains, and all of her bracelets and armlets. She almost wanted to ask if she could put one of the chokers back on, because as it were she felt kind of vulnerable without some kind of neck covering, but then stopped herself for being silly.

You were always vulnerable, Roxy. Gotta keep reminding yourself that.

The bathtub/swimming pool was slightly underfilled, and the water was warm and relaxing, despite being the same water she swam in each morning. The Empress slowly lowered herself in along with her, and gestured to the bath's edge, and Roxy, begrudgingly dutifully, swam to the highest part of the bath so she could sit down. Despite the comfort, she still felt tense, her body freezing up when the Empress's hands came to gently press on her shoulder... So, the Empress let go. Instead of using her hands, she sat on the opposite side of the bathtub and grabbed stuff off the edges of the bath with her telekinesis, whipping them around slowly with a single finger. "Ya seem tense." She said, twirling around two heavy, solid marbles, each one about the size of Roxy's fists, and beginning to lower them onto Roxy's shoulders.

"I don't know if you've  _noticed_ , but I still- _ohh_ " Roxy begun, and then immediately stopped when the marbles were pressed into that tense spot between your shoulderblades and your neck, you know the one? The marbles gently dug into her skin, far heavier than they appeared to be. Never in two opposite directions, since Roxy suspected (although not right now, since she was too relaxed) that the Empress could only telekinesis in a single direction at a time, but still. Roxy's back lifted off the edge of the bath and she slid forward on her seat, the massaging marbles telekinetically rolllllllled down her beck, on both sides of her spine, and then back up, and down, and up, and down.

Roxy slapped her hand over her mouth when she realized she had begun drooling into the bath. The Empress didn't seem to notice, or care, just continuing the massage with an omnipresent, thin grin. The spheres rolled over to Roxy's arms, just as heavy and lovely underwater, back and forth, back and forth, into her hands, down her chest. She really let out a noise that disgusted herself when they pressed into her thighs, beginning to take care of knots she didn't even realize were there. Sticking her legs out so that the Empress could telekinetically massage her calves seemed like the natural thing to do.

Roxy dipped her mouth underwater so that she could let it hang open without drooling again, doing that thing where you just don't let the water in your mouth. With, like, gravity, or air pressure or some shit like that. That wasn't Roxy's area of scientific expertise, so she didn't know how it was done, but all she knew was that this was wonderful. A small stream of water redirected itself from the faucet and gently ran through her neck-length hair, while the marbles ran over some knots here and there, pressing and drilling and rolling into them until they vanished.

By the time her hair had been lathered with fizzy shampoo, Roxy was limper than a wet noodle. But she didn't care. Jets of water caressed and held her body (a feature she had no idea existed in the bath, but, in retrospect, made sense), with one almost jolting her awake by being pointed straight at her crotch, until the Empress shut it back off. No, only relaxing. The rest of the next two hours were a blur of cleaning and cleansing, and a second massage, then some scented frou-frou bullshit that made Roxy feel dizzy with joy. By the time the "spa treatment" had ended, Roxy could barely stand, let alone walk. The Empress gently lifted her up, and she didn't resist, a towel summoned from nearby, shooting into her Empress's hand, to dry her pruney skin off. At some point, a small, person-sized cushion had been put on the floor of the ablution chamber, but Roxy didn't know or care when.

All she knew was the culturally familiar concept of having lotion applied to your nude body, except this time, by alien hands far larger than they should've been. For some reason, Roxy couldn't bring herself to care very much. She wasn't even tensing away from the Empress like she normally did, her body and brain happy, even if her rational mind might've been a little peeved. The Empress politely avoided her nook, but she didn't shy away from Roxy's chest until Roxy started making noises that were likely interpreted as... Pain? Something like that. Roxy didn't want to correct her and tell her to keep going, even as the Empress massaged her limbs into some transcendental state beyond perfect relaxation. Rolled onto her front, and the same on her back.

By the time they were fully finished, Roxy had nearly fallen asleep. The Empress lifted her up with a gentle telekinetic hand, throwing the cushion into a bin nearby, and softly carried Roxy along, shuffling open the entrance to Roxy's respiteblock and tucking her favorite pink blanket over top.

Roxy couldn't stop herself from mumbling "Thnkyew, 'mpress...". Realistically, she wasn't sure if she needed to stop herself.

Then, she fell asleep.


	13. Damnation

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> dam·na·tion  
> /damˈnāSH(ə)n/
> 
> condemnation to **eternal punishment** in hell.

Spending half a year on an alien spaceship by your lonesome was difficult. Every day, she had to contend with the knowledge that Earth culture, as she remembered it, no longer existed. That her sister, Rose, was living somewhere among the fleet with an Alternian jailer keeping her under lock and key. That the rest of her friends were scattered across the galaxy, one way or the other, either as stardust or as a slave, and that they'd likely never meet again. That the possibility of her meeting another living human was slim-to-none. And that after 180 days, masturbation with just her fingers grew  _tiresome_.

All this time, that reminder of those first haunting days sat in one of the cubbies in her respiteblock, just out of sight. She never switched the cubby away from the keratin extractor intentionally, but sometimes, the synthetic nookworm sat there anyway, in a space she chose to ignore, almost taunting her. The memory of it kept her awake when she had those lizard brain urges interrupting her beauty sleep. Whenever her eye brushed across it, she hated that she had begun to consider it. On her one hundred and eightieth day of captivity, still nude and undressed from the pile of jewelry she wore, after a day of nothing notable in particular, she grabbed for it. To be fair to herself, she had been grabbing for it for the past week, but she always stopped herself just before she could.

This time, she didn't.

It was about 6 inches long when straightened out, and Roxy took the time to examine it thoroughly, to make sure she knew what she was about to jam into her hoo-ha. Sealed, likely waterproof, and plasticky, there wasn't a seam to be found on the entire thing, only troll-made synthskin stretched out over what was really a relatively simple alignment of motors. Kid stuff, really, the only issue in making one from scratch was materials, and the only reason she didn't try to take it apart to make some kind of shitty weapon was that Alternian tech was almost universally biologically based, even the "synthetic" nookworm. She assumed that meant that there existed a kind of non-synthetic nookworm, forgetting for a moment that she had been told that very thing 6 months ago. D'oh. Either way, she wasn't trained in Alternian technology, so if she split this open, it'd probably just bleed to death and die, but even across species, a motor array was a motor array.

The front end was recognizable by its mock mouthpiece, while the tail end had a pretty, polished, and spherically cut fuchsia gem embedded into it. That, she remembered. Little nodules of fake flesh opened up to reveal thick, two-clawed grabbers, six on each side, for a total of twelve claws, 24 little talons, but they could curl up into thick, ridged nubs at a moment's notice, presumably when it detected, somehow, that it was inside of someone. It was about two fingers wide and evenly thick all around. Roxy passed it around in her hands, feeling the smooth surface, when she heard a soft chime from the wall. A tiny little packet of gel, with no visible way to open it. How magnanimous. She tried to puncture it with her nails, but to no avail, so her next guess was to splash some water on it, and that seemed to do the trick. Trial and error, Roxy, you're good at it. Quickly, the plastic-like coating dissolved, leaving her with a handful of slick gel.

Only one thing to do with stuff like that, so, swallowing her pride, she squished it into the front of the synthetic nookworm and made sure to get it good and lubricated. How nice of her Empress to give her some lube - was her sarcastic thought. It wasn't much like Earth lube, more gelatinous, almost oily, but, well... It spread, and it got the nookworm ready for action.

Roxy steadied her hands and sighed, feet gently resting in her little washing basin. She couldn't believe she was about to do this. She couldn't believe she was about to do this. Gripping the synthetic nookworm tightly caused it to spring to life, beginning to writhe about slowly and sedately in her hands, almost wriggling right out. A slow, sterile action, she pressed it up against her crotch, letting those grabby little hands reach for her nook, reaching out just slightly until they hooked on. Roxy shuddered, from her toes to her head, partially out of disgust, partially out of how wet she had suddenly gotten.

The sensation of having a bio-organic but still fake sex worm crawling into your vagina is not something Roxy would either forget nor recommend to anyone not stuck in the same dire straits as her. The tips of the nookworm's little claws were rounded off enough to avoid literally stabbing her insides, ow, but they were pointed just enough that it was unpleasant. It grabbed hold of whatever it could, not quite doing a great job at it, so Roxy begrudgingly pressed against the tail end, giving it a little assist. She tried not to enjoy the sensation as much as she was, feeling it slowly come up to its end. An almost perfect fit, coiled up slightly inside of her, almost like it was made for that particular hole. It slowly gyrated as it disappeared, for the most part, only that little fuchsia gem sticking out from between her folds as an outward reminder to its presence, although the inward reminders were... Constant, to say the least.

She was torn almost perfectly in half between being disgusted at how far she had fallen, and enjoying, for the first time in half a year, a satisfyingly full sensation inside of her. Something better than her fingers, thick enough to be felt, gently twirling in aileron rolls inside of her. The little nubby claws had turned into hardened, semispherical lumps, and were slowly pressing outward as if they were on a piston, grinding into her, each segment capable of independently rotating to an extent. It worked completely on its own. She just... Laid back, and let it ride.

It took about 10 minutes for her to start getting close, so she slid gently into the washbasin to make sure she didn't make a mess on the bed. Her only memories of getting fucked with this strange device had an odd haziness to them, even though she remembered the device itself clear as day, and for the first piece of variety she had in several months, she wasn't sure if she was going to squirt or not. She did feel it, though, that slow boiling, tense sensation in her body, her muscles preparing to clench down on useless breeding urges that will never be activated for their proper purpose again. Roxy positioned herself sideways, letting the water run down the slight curve of her stomach, down her hips, her butt and back against the wall while the warm water gently spread out along her ajar legs.

She took in a couple of deep inhales, sighed, and felt the springs begin to unwind, the soft touch of warm water just enough to kick off the inevitable chain reaction. She felt it building up, in the top, back of her pelvis, squirming around, and then it came tumbling down. Roxy took in another deep lungful of breath and something cracked apart, her pelvis starting to wildly clench around the synthetic life inside of it in an obvious attempt to crush the intruding monstrosity. Roxy's legs kicked a little as satiation filled her from her toes to the top of her head.

She hated this.

Why did it feel so good? 

After about a minute of subdued thrashing that she barely noticed, she finally regained her breath, reaching down to help the water sluice her cum down into the drain. She should pull it out now, press on the top of her pelvis and let it wriggle its way out. She should pull it out, satisfied, wash it, dry it, and put it back in the cubby, never to be noticed again. Her curiosity satisfied, she reached down, her hand lingering near the entrance to her nook, almost being stared at by the sliver of fuchsia watching her fingers. Her other arm's elbow helped her remain lying on her side but the palm felt the top of her clean-shaven pubic mound. Just press it out, and put it away. Experiment over. No more need to keep this accursed thing in.

Putting that hand back down into the washbasin, the lingering fingers reached down.

Slowly, they began to work at her clit.

Why not go two for two?


	14. Condemnation

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> con·dem·na·tion  
> /ˌkändəmˈnāSH(ə)n/
> 
> the action of condemning someone to a **punishment** ; sentencing.

"I need new toys." Roxy requested, a month after she had broken her promise to herself.

Another thirty days aboard the Battleship Condescension, and the synthetic nookworm had already gotten boring.

Routine.

Stale.

"Whuh?" Her Empress replied, taken aback by the sudden request. It wasn't like they typically had a very talkative relationship with one another - Roxy responded when asked to respond, and that was typically the long and short of it. She was speaking up, independently and out of the blue, perhaps for the first time. "Like... A game grub? For _wigglers_?"

"No!" Roxy responded frustratedly, thumping her head against her Empress's thigh. "I mean, yes, those would be cool too, but... I need... New... Toys." She tried to explain, making all sorts of wild and slightly agonized gesticulations. It took her Empress a couple of seconds to get the picture, but Roxy saw the wheels turning, the puzzle pieces clicking into place like valves in a video game, chunks rotating to form a path from point A-B. The satisfaction of a conundrum solved.

"Oh. _New_." She summated, smirking almost victoriously at Roxy, that kind of look that made Roxy want to reach up and bite her fins off. "You need a new nook toy."

Nothing had changed aboard the Battleship Condescension outside of Roxy's general anger levels. She wasn't sure if it was something in the water, or something in her food, or maybe the air, or the least likely option, that her masturbating three to four times a day would wear out the novelty of a new toy and now she was frustrated when it didn't make her cum as well as it did before. There was absolutely no way that she was getting pent up like a meowbeast prancing around the rumpusblock without enrichment and accessories. And yet, here she was, asking her Empress for a new sex toy. Roxy's face burned under her tiara, skin turning bright red as she looked away from the Empress.

"Don't worry ya pretty little head, gill. I'll get ya both." Her Empress responded, reaching a head down to scratch Roxy's scalp with a light, gossamer touch, fuchsia nails dragging against her skin in a way that made her feel oh-so-cared for NO! She managed to stop herself from nuzzling into her Empress's hand after about 6 seconds of almost purring, which was a little longer than last time. She jerked her head away, turned towards the corner of the throne, and pouted. She didn't squirm off the throne when her Empress just moved her hand and continued scratching Roxy's head.

* * *

 

Enrichment. It was a word they used on Earth (how long was it since she thought long and hard about Earth, rather than just as a passing memory in her dreams? It had been too long. Weeks, probably), for when you owned a caged animal and it was getting antsy. It needed something to play with. A lion having a carcass to rip and shred. A hippopotamus crushing watermelons like fruit gushers. A monkey being shown magic tricks.

A cat with a scratching post.

After their final rounds around the ship, Roxy returned to her space in her Empress's respiteblock. She was vaguely unsurprised to see that there were plenty of new knicknacks awaiting her, along with some kind of room expansion to offer her more room, with some kind of computer display sunken into the wall near where her pillows were set. She tried to peek around, see if there were wires, cords, something that she could strangle or stab or turn into a bomb with, but it was too flush to see. The doors hissed shut, and the terminal's screen beeped to life with a lovely little chime.

"Roxy!" It said, declared, even, causing her to double take, as if remembering for a moment that her name was Roxy. Of course it was. It fed her a little spiel about it being a gaming terminal retrofitted from a computer that the Mustardbloods were playing with, since they were really the only people on the ship with the free time to play video games, and that it had several dozen game grubs installed for her perusal. For a moment, she imagined them, dozens of wriggling, fat grubs, like the programs and codeworms she had seen on her rounds, writhing behind the wall, ready to be squished the next time her room shifted at her behest. She turned around to face the other wall, half expecting nothing, half expecting something, so ultimately, while it wasn't a full vindication (more of a half of one), to see a new toy was genuinely somewhat pleasant, even if it was a toy that required, erm...

Considerable manual use.

A fake bulge. Bright fuchsia, studded with jewelry - Roxy had no doubt in her mind that it was a replica of her Empress's. Or a replica of the Empress's tip? With its current, say, five inches or so of size (if it were stretched out), she couldn't see it being anything but wildly disproportionate on someone her size. She knew how big bulges were, and how they scaled upwards with troll body size, more or less, since it had been in part of her lessons (although the anatomy lessons stopped with the Seadwellers), so a five inch bulge really felt like she was being tossed a rust or a yellow's bulge. Roxy almost felt a little angry at that. The thought that she might have been given some rust's bulge-fake as a toy to play with. She wasn't sure why, considering her best friend was a rustblood, but the anger burnt like shame in the core of her heart, a miniature sun before she calmed herself down with a bath.

Then, she examined the thing closer. It wasn't as motorized as the synthetic nookworm, and it was more like a poseable model. You could wind and manipulate it into shape, and then press a button on the base that would cause it to lock into place, preventing further motion, which was useful. Roxy stretched it out to its full length, locked it in, and played with her clit just a bit to get herself wet. A dab of the lubricating packets, smeared along the surface of the bulge, and in it went, making a noise that made Roxy shudder as it penetrated her. The metal of the gold jewelry was cold, as expected, and the bulge itself she could feel getting cooler inside of her, presumably as a way to replicate her Empress's body temperature. That made her feel more at ease, the chill inside of her, how it settled itself comfortably before the motors kicked in and let it gently wobble and writhe. Far less than the nookworm, it just simply wound up and down like a sine wave.

It was nothing spectacular, but the texture was slick and nice and new and different. Cool, and good. She let it sit there, and turned around, putting a towel down so she didn't get her bed wet while she looked for a video game to play. She wondered just how good Alternian video games were.


	15. Obliteration

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ob·lit·er·a·tion  
> /əˌblidəˈrāSH(ə)n/
> 
> the action or fact of obliterating or being obliterated; **total destruction**.

Roxy rang in her first year aboard the Battleship Condescension with a pretty reasonable request. Or, at least, she thought it was pretty reasonable.

How hard was it to ask your Empress that you wanted to kill that you  _also_ had grown desirous to think about what her bulge was like? Reconfiguring all fourteen inches of her synthetic toy each night into a new and intriguing arrangement, each one a different way for Roxy to feel it inside of her. Every couple of weeks, it would get replaced with a larger one, just as Roxy was about to get bored, the same as her game grubs getting cycled through, keeping her constantly entertained. As they tried and tried, though, Roxy was getting worse by the day. Antsier. More impatient. Perhaps even ill-tempered, like she was backsliding into her old behaviors from a year prior, when she was all fire and fury, really getting ready to rip out her Empress's air bladder through her gills.

The reality was far more mundane than that. Roxy was free - free of worry, of sadness and doubt. She had received status reports from all her friends recently, and the fact that they were all doing fine was great to put her mind at ease.

Jane, dear, sweet Jane, had somehow become the newest Grand Highblood's personal secretary, taking on an impressive amount of responsibilities. Enough that she was beginning to make waves, even. Good on her. Fight the power, or something like that. Jake and Aradia had become close enough that they had taken on a somewhat taboo matespritship, which made Roxy's nose rankle every time she thought about it. Not to denigrate both of them, because they made an excellent pairing, consistently outranking their peers, but she thought Jake deserved better than a rustblood. John and the legislacerator, Terezi (because Roxy was important enough now to be privy to their names, something that she let herself feel small moments of pride over) were getting along famously. Nothing groundbreaking. John was always an easy guy to get along with. Dave made an excellent companion to the hemoanonymous threshecutioner - curiouser and curiouser, since, as far as Roxy knew, hemoanonymity was against military code, but she supposed that Karkat was a particularly special threshecutioner for one reason or another. And Rose...

Rose was doing fine.

She finished her dictionary's first edition a month ago.

Roxy knew. She had it memorized the best she could.

It was almost like talking to her.

No more of her friends had died. Really, they seemed to have been thriving, just like she was.

Roxy was free. She had long since discarded the thought of her as a captive, but now, she was as free as a human could get. She could go anywhere on the ship should she desire. She could eat any food, talk to any person, play any game, make any demand. Her will was the will of her Empress, although she tried hard not to let the power go to her head.  She was eating well and freely, the best food that could be whipped up in a starship's kitchen for her. She wasn't exactly fat by any standards, but gone was the comparatively shriveled figure that had arrived on the Battleship Condescension exactly a year ago. Her breasts were full and bare, her legs plush, her figure turned into something comparable to a scaled down version of her Empress. She could tell by the way many of the trolls looked at her that she was widely desired.

She understood why, too. After all, Roxy considered herself a pretty choice piece of ass. She was decked to the nines in jewelry at almost all times, the same way her Empress was. Bangles and bracelets and chains, up and down her limbs and digits. Putting them to use, a month ago, she requested a piercing, re-opening the since-sealed holes in each earlobe for a little golden stud. And her tiara game? On point.

The facts of the matter were that she didn't remember why "365 Days" had any meaning to her.

Fresh off her invigorating moiraillegience session with her new moirail, she walked back into the throne room with a spring in her step. Oh yeah, the new moirail! Her name was Levhia Tathan, this sweet violetblooded peach. Three-ish months ago, Jostun had tried to proposition Roxy in the black, so she got executed. After that, Dorsat and Roxy's relationship deteriorated, to say the least. But Dorsat was at the bottom of the food chain, so it wasn't like Roxy saw him very often. Out of sight and out of mind, that was how it went, right?

When she made her request to her Empress, she didn't expect it to be approved. In fact, she expected her Empress to balk.

But thankfully, she accepted almost immediately.

* * *

"So, why do ya wanna do this again?" Her Empress asked, her nude form climbing onto the pailing cushion with Roxy, who had already disrobed (as much as you could when all you wore was jewelry and metal, at least) about five minutes ago. Despite the fact that she knew, on some level, that she hated this gigantic troll woman, that she wanted nothing more than to do unspeakably violent things to her, and not in a blackrom way, she couldn't help but feel some kind of intimacy in the air. Was this... Love? Lust? It was something concupiscent, that was sure enough to Roxy.

"If I told you that I don't know, would ya accept that?" Roxy shot back, trying to make her face twist into something rude but unable to muster the conviction necessary to do it convincingly. So instead, she let her Empress hook an arm around her back, settling into her place nestled in the crook of her Empress's shoulder and neck. A hand with pink-painted nails, her own, reached out to linger on the dark grey skin of her Empress's stomach, feeling the texture nervously. Despite the fact that she had washed every part of the Empress every morning, to touch her outside of the sanctity of the bathroom felt wrong. Dirty, somehow. Unholy.

"Shore, shore. Not the weirdest thing you've asked from me." She crooned back, letting one of her massive hands drape onto Roxy's stomach, the cold touch causing her to shiver. Her body shook while she curled up against her for more warmth, pressing her face into the side of her Empress's bust. Her Empress reached down, and she could feel the thoughts thrumming off of her in waves, watching the telekinetic energy fuzz the air like a heat wave. Roxy shook even harder now, twisting about while pulsating, strumming waves of psionic energy squeezed at her chest, starting from the back and reaching all the way down to the front. At the very tip, each vaguely red and blue, spasmodic twitch of energy pinched at her nipples for an instant upon their collapse into a singular point, the massage immediately beginning to soften Roxy's mood considerably.

Her moans started as squeaks, restrained and held back in the prison cage that was her throat and lungs. This close, this vulnerable, her Empress's presence was overwhelming. Her aura, if such a thing was real. Her je ne sais quoi. She thought she was going to get to finally see her Empress's bulge, but right now, it seemed like she was the one being toyed with, and she couldn't at all say it was unpleasant. Her breasts being kneaded with telekinesis was a warmth that no hands, human or otherwise, could manage, and her Empress's hand had drifted down to Roxy's nook, where she quietly pressed her thighs together. Not to stop her, but more out of shame, that she didn't have a tentabulge to wind its way out from a sheathe and curl around her Empress's fingers, in the way that she saw in the CGs of her visual novels.

The idea was so fantastical. She had never seen a live bulge before, but the way they were presented by her  ~~propaganda~~ video games was in this all-encompassingly positive light. Even the most worthless rustblood had a bulge that could be put to use propagating the species. The thought struck her as romantic and tragic at the same time. But her Empress's icy touch made her shudder from her toes to her hair, and her legs opened back up. A finger big enough to count as a dildo on its own  ~~how long had it been since she thought of fingers as phallic?~~ approached

Time seemed to grind to a halt and speed into a furor at the same time. Roxy wasn't being penetrated, thank  ~~god~~ the Empress, but the size and chill were almost like someone had put a toy in the fridge. A sensation she can't say she was unfamiliar with, the way it pressed on her clit almost expectantly. Covering her face with both hands, she managed to force the words out with a heaving breath. "I-I don't have a bulge, Empress..." She admitted, taking gulps of air between every other word as her breasts were toyed with, the Empress's fingertip rubbing soft circles where her tentabulge, should there be any justice in the world  ~~which there wasn't~~ , should've been.

"Duh." Was her Empress's reply, and Roxy felt pretty silly for even bringing it up. Of course she knew that. Duh. What was she so anxious about, again? She reached out and grabbed for her Empress's shoulders, pulling herself up onto her Empress's body, eliciting a raised eyebrow, close enough that the telekinetics came to a rather sudden stop and her hand retracted. The one that was previously holding Roxy to her shoulder simply lie across the cushion, while the other one wrapped around Roxy's back while she used her Empress's chest as pillows.

She took a couple of deep breaths. Her body was tingling, buzzing with anticipation, and her mouth felt both dry and full of saliva at the same time. She was already so wet that it had begun to drip down her inner thighs.

"Hey. Uh. Can I kiss you?"


	16. Consultation

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> con·sul·ta·tion  
> /ˌkänsəlˈtāSH(ə)n/
> 
> a meeting with an **expert or professional** , such as a medical doctor, in order to **seek advice**.

It was like fireworks, in the same way that fireworks tended to be explosive, colorful, and dangerous to be around.

Her kiss was nothing but electricity surging through her veins, crackling and sparking, her lower body lifted into the air with invisible hands so that she could be hoisted over her Empress's chest. Roxy reached out to grab her, trying to get a hold of her, but even her hands weren't enough to prevent her from slipping upwards into the air, toppling head-over-ass-over-head until her Empress stopped her, hanging limply above her. Roxy's eyes traced her Empress's nude body, her fluorescent fuchsia freckles, the golden studs in her nipples  ~~maybe Roxy should get some~~ shining in the dim light of the pailing chamber  ~~so shiny and gold~~ and drawing her gaze  ~~make up your mind~~ closer.

To call her Empress decked out would be an understatement, in fact. There was jewelry almost everywhere, even when she didn't have her wetsuit on. These were little things that Roxy's eyes had just... tuned out over the year. She had personally attended to her Empress's bathing every single day, and yet, the fact that her fins were studded with rings, the little golden piece in her navel  ~~which Roxy thought would look just as hot on her~~ shining and refracting the light, all of these things had just been tuned out like radio static. The omnipresent noise of running water turned into simple background texture that she had missed entirely, but now that she was re-witnessing her Empress in a new, sensual light, these features became prominent once more. She only blushed a little bit when her Empress caught her staring.

"What, you like what you see? You never act like this in the bath. Whassa matter wit chu, gill?" She teased, gently twirling her pointer finger in circles to cause Roxy to twist in the air like a ballerina on a string. Her Empress's teeth were a collection of chef's knives arranged in an artful, beautiful row, ready to bite  ~~and sink into Roxy's shoulders and make her bleed and~~ , hiding a rough grey tongue  ~~that Roxy wanted buried in her nook so bad that sometimes it hurt~~  behind its pearlescent smile. Roxy's eyes got caught  ~~~~ ~~thinking about her Empress's bulge, all ridged and ready to penetrate~~ staring into her Empress's pink irises, and that only made her grin wider ~~, made Roxy wetter~~. Roxy's head was filled with fuzz  ~~and it wasn't from her Empress like a year ago~~ and her body was full of heat  ~~that was au naturel, baby~~ and her desire had never been greater.

"I-I don't know!" Roxy squealed, squirming in her zero-G prison  ~~the way she wanted to squirm with a bulge deep inside of her~~ , left to right, wriggling around like a dying wiggler. She brought her hands to her face and covered herself up in embarrassment. She felt so hot and flushed  ~~and yes in the quadrant way not just the blood way don't lie Roxy you want her _red_ and  **concupiscent** don't lie to yourself~~ that she didn't know what to do, trying to curl up into a ball.  ~~You're so in love with her and you don't even know when it happened. Was it all at once, right now, in her pailing chamber? Or was it over the course of a year as she tended to you like her favorite cat?~~

 ~~Roxy was confused~~ Roxy was confused  ~~Roxy was confused~~  Roxy was confused  ~~Roxy was confused~~  Roxy was confused  ~~Roxy was confused~~  Roxy was confused  ~~Roxy was confused~~  Roxy was confused  ~~Roxy was confused~~  Roxy was confused  ~~Roxy was confused~~  Roxy was confused  ~~Roxy was confused~~  Roxy was confused  ~~Roxy was confused~~  Roxy was confused  ~~Roxy was confused~~  Roxy was confused 

Her anguish was painted on her face, a portrait dripping in sweat, a masterpiece of her Empress's  ~~divine~~ work. Her head was all mixed up. She felt like she  ~~had to~~ needed to scream but she didn't know why. She didn't realize she had begun sobbing, nor did she realize that she had stopped floating, until her Empress's hand reached out to pat her back, coiling over her shoulder. It squeezed, not like she was trying to  ~~break her toy~~ hurt her, but more like she was trying to  ~~comfort her toy~~ comfort her. Roxy's brain felt like it was about to

split

in

half

 

Roxy almost screamed but nothing left her lips. She didn't know what was happening to her, or why she was so anguished about some kind of decision she couldn't bring herself to make. To be perfectly honest, it felt like she was dying, in a way, even with the cool, familiar hand of her Empress holding her steady and calm. She was naked and alone and afraid and she didn't know where she was anymore. Was she having an anxiety attack? Yes.

Roxy suddenly came to the realization that she was having an anxiety attack. She squeezed her hair and tried to rip it out but the calming caress of a psionic touch stopped her, stopped her in her tracks, stopped her from doing something stupid, stopped her from hurting herself more than she already had, stopped her stopped her stopped her.

She felt like a train hurtling towards a canyon cliff. She wasn't in control of herself anymore, but it wasn't her Empress in control either, nobody was in control, neither of them was in control, Roxy wasn't in control, and the train kept accelerating to its inevitable fiery destination down below.

She was beginning to choke on her sobs, she didn't understand why this was happening. She just wanted to indulge in more of the pleasure she had grown used to during her stay on the Battleship Condescension, the pleasures of food and video games and her Empress and toys, but something was stopping her from letting go completely. Sometimes, she thought about Earth and wondered idly about it. How it was doing. If it was alive.

Something thrashed about in her head like a dying psychopomp undergoing its last throes of consciousness, begging to not be taken from this plane, it still had work to do, they still had work to do, she still had work to do, there was more to be done. She needed to resist whatever bullshit psionic lure had been buried inside of her since day fucking one.

She fought and fought and fought. She wasn't even aware of the real world anymore, outside of the dull, cold sensation of the Empress's skin, the dry stickiness of her wetness on her pussy, the ex-languorous world of Sol III, dirt beneath her, no, carpet, Rose in the room, her friends in the room, grabbing at her, pulling at her limbs until she was

drawn

and

quartered

  
She had lost ~~/won~~ the fight with herself.

Roxy Lalonde was in love with her Empress. 

| 

~~half~~

 

~~Roxy knew exactly what was happening but she didn't want to bring herself to admit it.~~

~~She had fallen hopelessly, completely, and utterly in love with her Empress, even though she had no reason to do so. In her mind, she knew that her Empress had conquered her entire race, destroyed her home planet, and was out to continue conquering and continue destroying and continue enslaving, and yet, none of that mattered.~~

~~Roxy was so fucking flushed for her it burned.~~

~~It burned in her nook when she jilled off in her respiteblock, wishing that she could properly please her Empress, even when she thought her active mind wasn't listening. But we were there, in her subconscious, and we knew her real inner thoughts. Was it when her Empress comforted her after her many tantrums? Was it when she was fed and clothed, and made whole again despite the heartbreak of losing it all? Was it when she knew Rose, sweet Rose, was doing just fine despite her captivity? Was that the point at which she gave up?~~

~~There is a point in which this has stopped being a story about Roxy's captivity, and started being a story about her love. If you're astute, you can find the exact moment in which the switch occurred, the see-saw swung over to the other side, and Roxy was, beyond a shadow of a doubt, absolutely fucked.~~

~~And yet, that was part of the problem. She was certainly not fucked. She was, in fact, thoroughly unfucked, and not even in the literal sense of copulatory activities, and even that had its own painful edge to it. Roxy was chubby and happy and well fed and she had video games and she had jewelry and she had the attention of everyone on the ship. She was her Empress's favorite, far and beyond even the highest violetbloods, and that filled Roxy with impotent joy and hubris.~~

~~What had Roxy been doing with her life, truly, before this? The days passed through her fingers like sand in a sieve. Well, she had been eating, and programming to earn money to eat, and talking with her friends, but sometimes friends move away, and this was just like that. Sometimes you lose people in your life, and sometimes you gain new people. Now, Roxy could focus on the simple things without having to worry about pain and strife and misery and starvation.~~

~~There was nothing left for her to worry about besides her own denial.~~

~~There was nothing left for her to worry about besides her own denial.~~

~~There was nothing left for her to worry about besides her own denial.~~

~~There was nothing left for her.~~

~~There was nothing left.~~

~~Roxy Lalonde was in love with her Empress.~~  
  
---|---


	17. Demarcation

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> de·mar·ca·tion  
> /ˌdēmärˈkāSH(ə)n/
> 
> the action of fixing the boundary or **limits** of something.

When Roxy came to, it was to an expression that the part of her burned away in her phoenix-fire would've been confused to look at. Worry and concern from her Empress knit on her brow, while she was rocked back and forth, gently and slowly. Roxy's throat was hoarse and her body was covered in sweat, and not in the way that indicated to her that anything remotely fun had happened in the past... However long it had been. She was being cradled, up against one of her Empress's forearms, with the other one gently petting her hair. It wasn't a teasing pet, or the kind of petting meant to reinforce Roxy's (ha) pet status, but the gentle, nail-lacking strokes of someone trying to calm someone else down.

"Man, you're  _reely_ somefin, gill." Her Empress said, holding Roxy closer to her icy body, a difference in temperature that she had gotten used to at this point. The room was warmer than it was when she... Passed out? Had a psychotic break of some kind? Honestly, she wasn't really sure  _what_ just happened, other than that it was uncomfortable and that she thought she might've been hallucinating wildly - or dreaming. "What the shell was all of that?"

"All of what?" Roxy replied blearily, trying to raise a hand to wipe sweat from her forehead. Her Empress tsk'd with pursed lips, bringing a thumb over to do the job instead, and Roxy melted. Her body was overheated as shit from the psychological strain of whatever it was that just happened (Rose was the psychologist, after all, not her), so the cool seadweller temperature of her Empress's skin was like ambrosia, and she leaned and hummed into every tiny touch.

"Well, yer eyes started buggin' out and then you started screamin' like a subjugglator in heat so I just grabbed ya and hugged ya til' you stopped." Her Empress explained, wiping what were probably the trailing remnants of tears out from Roxy's cheeks, using her thumb to do most of the comforting work.

"How long was I out for?" Roxy asked, her eyes half-lidded. Her face felt puffy, like she had gotten a shiner in both eyes, and the saliva in her mouth was thick and sticky and gross.

"Uh... Like, ten minutes." Her Empress answered, and Roxy looked down at her chest.

"Wow." She muttered.

"Yeah. An impressive set a lungs on you, gill." Her Empress replied, and they both shared a somewhat uncomfortable chuckle. "I think in tha future, we should try not ta use my psionics on ya. I don't think you like 'em very much."

Roxy laughed nervously. "I mean, it was fun! While I was on the ground."

Her Empress waved a hand, and from somewhere Roxy wasn't looking, a small bubble filled with liquid, sloshing and squirming with the motion of telekinesis, pulled itself through the air towards them. "Yea, yea. Bite a hole in this and drink up."

Roxy obeyed. She did as she was told, puncturing the skin of the sphere with her canines and then letting her Empress tilt her backward, feeling the cool water wash through her, flushing through her body. Out of instinct, she continued chewing on the skin, and finding it pleasantly edible, pressed the rest of it into her mouth and swallowed in chunks. Her Empress's eyes were lowered and narrow, fuchsia irises in a sea of yellow, looking down at her pitiful, fragile pet.

"I'm not gonna pail ya today. Ya probably thought you would. It was in my plans, for good or for krill." She said, and while Roxy's face dropped, she knew from that look that her decision was final. Her Empress began to lean back on the pailing platform, letting Roxy use her chest as headrests, and gently began to push her down. "Howeva..."

There she was, back at attention while her head curled up near her Empress's navel. Her hand idly played with the barbell, just kind of feeling out the metal. Hoping that it'd be something she could get soon (as soon as they were done with this, she'd be asking, Roxy decided right then and there). "Yeah?" She chirped excitedly, still a little hoarse, but now able to speak easily and freely thanks to her increased hydration status.

"I'm not gonna say no if ya wanna jack my bulge off..." Her Empress declared, a statement with relaxed finality. She spread her legs enough to make a cool little space for Roxy to slide right into, and Roxy let out a noise that wouldn't have been out of place coming out of an actual meowbeast. It was almost a purr of amusement - she wiped the last stray tear out of her face and began digging her fingers into the wide, unfurling petals of her Empress's nook. 

It looked almost a bit like fluttering fins of a Terran fish, with wavy, indistinct edges, gently twitching by its lonesome. The more Roxy touched, the wider they unfurled and longer they extended, revealing something that anatomically looked marginally similar enough to her labia that she imagined she knew what she was doing. She let out pleased hums, little giggles when one of the longer, thinner ends of her Empress's nook tickled her chin or her cheek, and listened as closely as possible for a positive response from her Empress. Every breath, even if only mildly heavier than normal, was an encouragement, urging her onwards. Her hands, already soaked in thin, semitranslucent lubricating fluid, were a marker of her continued success. She knew basic anatomy: even if she was a seadweller, her Empress still got aroused the way normal trolls did.

The only difference here between this and the books was really one of scale. Roxy was certainly used to playing with herself, but when her Empress's nook was literally about the size of her head, a lot of practical advice for stimulation sort of went out the window. The top of it, where her bulge was supposed to come out, was completely sheathed and closed up stubbornly, leaving only a tiny, pressed-tight vertical slit preventing the exit of Roxy's true goal. Still, she was nothing if not a persistent pet. What was normally pretty much impossible without a whole lot of lube was reasonably easy with someone that had a nook opening the size of your face - namely, Roxy's hand was somewhat smaller than her face, which meant that reaching up, dragging her fingertips across the interior of her Empress's nook canal, and delicately pressing on her shame globes from the other side was a perfectly viable maneuver, typically only talked about in hugely caste-divergent romance novels (the kind that Roxy read lots of). Up and to the back, near the entrance to the gene bladder - a little nub of flesh pressing outwards.

Squish.

Her Empress sucked in air through her teeth, and Roxy felt an immense surge of satisfaction run through her as the tiny slit atop her Empress's nook dilated open, revealing a little pink tip, writhing and thrashing with that first touch. The shape was already intimately familiar from her favorite toy, except this time, it was in front of her and live and writhing and Roxy had already begun to get wet while her body prepared for a penetration that would likely not be coming tonight. Instead, she leaned in closer and ran her tongue up from the base to the tip, slipping it just a bit into the sheath, before pressing her pointer and middle finger back up against her Empress's shame globes (or gene bulb, if we're being anatomically correct and not using slang). She was bottoming out at around halfway through her forearm, although it slowly slid out as she felt the bulging of her Empress's shame globes begin to shift while her bulge uncoiled. "That's some trick ya got there, gill... Ffffuck..."

Roxy watched in awe and pride - nothing in any of her videos compared to watching a bulge begin to unsheathe itself in live-action, in front of her, and, more importantly, from the Empress herself! After the first inch, Roxy was surprised (although, in retrospect, not really) to see rows of golden studs embedded in the underside of her Empress's tentabulge - rows of two, arranged neatly. Whenever Roxy thought _"This must be it, there can't be any more than this"_ , there was more, and more, and more, her other hand reaching out to ghost alongside the smooth, sticky surface, just barely touching. She pulled her other hand out slowly, slower, until she lost track of her Empress's gene bulb, only to regain sight of it a couple of seconds after the cessation of her poking and prodding, gently pressing themselves out of her Empress's sheath, the base of her bulge ringed by a tiny ring of grasping, cilia-like feelers that tried to pull Roxy's fingers closer. 

All in all, it had to be at least two feet long. Probably bigger, but Roxy wasn't really keeping track - she was salivating, literally drooling over her chin at the sight of the monstrous bulge in front of her. It was big enough to hug, probably about the width of, say, the space between Roxy's pupils at its widest. It could strangle her if her Empress wanted it to. Part of Roxy did. Using both hands (one still covered in a dripping layer of fuchisa), she grabbed a hold of her Empress's bulge, almost having to manhandle the writhing muscle in order to get the tip close to her mouth.

She took the opportunity when she could, not even going for the kissing and the licking. Instead, she forced herself down on it and kept straining her hands to force her Empress's bulge in an appropriate direction. Her Empress's legs twitched and her toes wiggled and she let out little pleased sighs and that made Roxy even wetter than the thought of sucking her off. Her bulge was slick and sticky with tacky preslurry, steadily leaking out from microscopic pores along the bulge, making maintaining a grip difficult (except for other bulges, which was evolutionarily the point), salty and acrid and gumming up her mouth.

It was lovely.

She couldn't really jerk it off so much as she could massage it, making sure to pay attention to her Empress's shame globes when she could afford to bring her hand down there - it seemed to be worth the interludes, judging by the way she reacted. "Where the shell'd you learn all this?" She heard her whine -  _whine!_ \- but Roxy's mouth was too preoccupied tonguing the first three to four inches of her Empress's bulge, bobbing back and forth, occasionally prodding the first piercings in line with her tongue or knocking against them with her teeth when she got close enough to. Her Empress reached down to gently grab at Roxy's hair, and Roxy pushed up into her touch, no longer minding the cold at all.

Roxy didn't feel even the slightest desire to touch herself - not even to bunch up the sheets and hump them. Her body was reacting fine enough on its own, her wetness dripping down her thighs, slobber and preslurry rolling down her chin and breasts and stomach.

Her Empress, as expected, had incredible stamina, and Roxy ended up cumming before she did, squeezing and clenching up at about the time of her first jaw break. Roxy clenched up, almost bit down, and pulled herself off to breathe and give her aching mouth and burning hands and strained arms a little rest, and her Empress showered her with compliments. Roxy was blissed out, resting her face at the base of her Empress's bulge without caring that it was coiling around her, coating her in sticky fluids, idly answering her Empress's questions with a dazy grin.

"Need a lil' break?"

"Yeah."

"You've got a reel good mouth on you, gill." She complimented, gently scritching Roxy's scalp, causing her to purr. It wasn't quite the same purr that she heard from the trolls she was trying to imitate, but it was a purr from the chest, her hands gently tracing against her Empress's freckled skin as she talked. "Reeeel nice fingers, too. You hafin a good time?"

Roxy looked up at her, lifting her head up just enough that the propped-up Empress had an easier time to see her face. Roxy wiped some preslurry off from her lips and lazily smirked. "What do you think, fishface?"


	18. Personification

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> per·son·i·fi·ca·tion  
> /pərˌsänəfəˈkāSH(ə)n/
> 
> the attribution of a personal nature or **human characteristics **to** something nonhuman**, or the representation of an abstract quality in human form.

One sweep in. Not that Roxy was really keeping track, but one sweep in nonetheless. Let's dip in for our usual check-up.

Here she was, sitting lovely and happy on the concupiscent cushion as she usually did. Sure, she went out and about on occasion, but there was really not a lot to do other than play video games and fuck her Empress, which she took to with gusto and abandon. She met with Levhia, but not very often, since her mood had become sweet and sugary enough to make her depression a thing of the past. Sure, there were lingering specters in the back of her mind, but, well... There was nothing to worry about.

Nothing to worry about.

Nothing to worry about.

She hadn't checked in on her friends in a while. At this point, with months of cooperation behind her, the Empress was willing to wait on her hand and foot. If she wanted detailed, itemized reports of every single person John and Jane and Dave and Jake had fraternized with, everyone they pailed with or talked to or exchanged Caegars with, she could get that. She'd be able to grab their daily itinerary, read their reports, do anything but speak to them face to face. It was just -- she was too busy for that. She had too much relaxation to do, too much fun to be having, and really, they were just out of mind.

Everyone except Rose. Roxy had sent her a letter a week ago, having had to work a month to muster up the courage to ask her Empress for permission. It was granted readily, of course. Roxy wrote Rose a letter, Rose wrote one back, and she was doing just fine. Kanaya and her had struck up a lovely matespritship, and Rose was going off-ship to work with Kanaya in one of the nursery worlds, recently conquered. That was so exciting! Rose seemed happy about Roxy's matespritship with her Empress as well, maybe even a little impressed. They passed messages back and forth until Rose's deployment, necessitating her cutting off from the outside world for two sweeps while they went about their high-security business breeding the future of the Alternian war machine.

Roxy was so proud of her. Her little Rosie. Her incredible sister, helping brood the next generation of Trolls.

So, so proud of her.

Roxy was barely recognizable at this point as the grave human that had arrived a sweep earlier, draped even further than imaginable in jewelry and light cloth, transparent, saucy things clinging from wrist to shoulders or tracing over her crotch. She was unsure if the desire to get pierced more was her own or that of her Empress, but it wasn't in her to question such a thing too much. Both nipples had a golden barbell, one in each, and her ears had gone from the previous single piercing to a dizzying array along each. A small stud in her navel and a ring in her nose, all shined, lustrous gold, just as her Empress liked it. She was as lustrous as a treasure chest and worth more Caegars than a thousand highblood bounties.

Her Empress's little treasure.

Thus she sat, awaiting her Empress's return. Video games would always be a love of hers, but she had memorized her Empress's schedule, and she knew when to stop playing games, alone in her respiteblock, and get over to help her unwind after a day of delegation and military command bullshit. Roxy's hands were between her legs, gently toying with a thick, squirming tentabulge -- a synthetic one, made at her request to help quell the uncomfortable feelings she got whenever she remembered that she didn't have one of her own. She had gotten to use it on occasion, only on her Empress, but it was more comfortable just being there, sitting on top of her clit, held on tight by an arcane series of loops and straps fed through her armor of jewelry and sashes.

Still, it felt nice to stroke it. Just idly touching it, up and down, feeling it squirm and writhe beneath her fingers in the most natural of ways. Only the best for her Empress's pet, after all. Her body was splayed out on the cushion, feeling the cold, salty air whistle and whine past her skin, legs spread out, other hand flopped idly above her head. She was relaxed, not bored, as waiting for her Empress had become just another part of her daily routine. Suffice to say, when the doors hissed and slid open, she let out a yelp of joy, almost springing off the cushion, but instead shuffling onto her knees and bowing reverently towards her Empress. She knew her place.

Her Empress always had a presence when she walked into a room, instantly filling it up with _her_ , but today, the presence seemed different somehow. Maybe it was the way she was walking with her knees ever so slightly bent inwards, the way she carried herself, or the slight stretching on her wetsuit in a place where there wasn't before. She seemed taut. Full, even. Roxy's face knit inward with the slightest bits and bobs of concern as her Empress sat down on the edge of the concupiscent cushion. Roxy was immediately by her side, reaching up to use her dextrous, tiny hands to knead tension out of her Empress's shoulders. Easier said than done, with the height difference, but by now she had her methods. "Is everyfin okay, Empress? You don't look so hot."

She laughed. It was a weird, almost bitter kind of laugh, and Roxy knew to move out of the way from the subtle shift in her Empress's muscles, that way that preceded an immediate leaning-back, a collapsing onto the cushion. She rubbed her stomach, this spot just above her pelvis, and groaned, more out of frustration than anything else. "Once in a cod damn lifetime and It's gotta be this sweep of all sweeps. Of course." She ran her hands through her hair, punching it up into angry bundles and yanking it hard enough that Roxy had to put her hands on her Empress's wrists to stop her from pulling any out. She grunted and whined in a way that was so totally unbecoming of her that Roxy's concern only grew by magnitudes.

"What? What's going on?" She asked, laying her empathetic hands on her Empress's shoulders.

Her Empress's laugh came once more, but the bitterness was much more apparent this time. "Once every two hundred sweeps or somefin' like that, the Fuchsias, we get... Eggy."

Eggy? What the hell-

Roxy's hand wandered down over to her Empress's paunch, where her tentabulge usually spent all of its time sheathed. Round. Lumpy. Bumpy and taut.

"Eggy?" Roxy asked, concerned.

"Eggy. Lil' caviar brood o' our own. Some dumb quirk that we neva' lost since there's so few 'a us." She clarified, not sounding any more enthused about the topic.

"And this is... A bad thing?" Roxy asked, immediately feeling stupid.

"'A course! Who the shell on this cruiser's gonna have the free time in the middle 'a a campaign to take care 'a a bunch 'a..." She started, only stopping herself by virtue of turning her hand to see Roxy, sitting so politely and ramrod stiff you'd imagine someone shoved a stripper pole all the way through her. One hand, raised dutifully and excitedly as high in the air as she could get it. "Grubs...?"

" _Please?_ "

**Author's Note:**

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